Six short lines, no punctuation, not one capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Consumers" looks almost too small to hold a war, and that smallness is part of its force. It reads like something said quickly and flatly, the way people speak of terrible things once they have stopped being shocked. Its claim is blunt. In trying to change how we feel or think about violence, we end up devouring it, and the dead along with it.
The title does the first piece of work. "Consumers" is the vocabulary of shopping, audiences and appetite, and the poem takes it literally. The opening clause, "thinking to alter / our minds we eat / the whole war," begins in the head, with a plan. "Alter our minds" suggests mind-altering substances, so war becomes something swallowed for an effect, to numb or to jolt. The word also sounds exactly like "altar." The spelling is different, but once eating and cooking arrive, the ear may catch a faint note of sacrifice or communion. That is an inference from sound, not something the poem states, but it fits a text about bodies being offered up and taken in.
The line breaks add a small trick. "Our minds we eat" can be read, for a split second, as a complete thought, as if we were eating our own minds. Only the next line delivers the real object, "the whole war." The word "whole" matters here: not a bite or a sample but everything, an appetite without limit. It also quietly sets up the poem's last word, since "whole" and "home" share a long o and form an echo across the stanza break.
That break is worth noticing too. The second stanza opens with "and," as if the sentence refuses to stop for breath, and then comes "cook the dead." After "eat," a verb of raw appetite, "cook" is domestic and calm. It suggests a kitchen, a method, someone preparing something to be palatable. Judging by the imagery, the poem hints that this is what we do with war: we trim it, season it and make it something that goes down easily. The dead are no longer people mourned but an ingredient.
Then the poem turns on its most ambiguous phrase, "our creature." It can describe the dead, something that belongs to us and for which we are responsible. It can also begin a new clause, so that "our creature," the animal body or the bare self beneath our clever plans, is the one "aching to go home." The poem never chooses. "Creature" is singular, so the many dead shrink into one body, and the word carries a hint of something made as well as something living. The final phrase has no verb to anchor it, so the aching simply floats there, unattached and unfinished.
Formally there is no rhyme and no steady meter. The lines run three to five syllables, and each short phrase lands like a mouthful. The sound patterns are quiet, such as the long e of "eat" and "creature," or the loose pairing of "alter" and "war." Without a regular beat to lean on, the reader is held by the grammar, a single sentence that keeps adding to itself.
Its closing movement is the most striking. The first stanza is cold and abstract, with minds, plans and "the whole war." The second drops into the physical, with cooking, bodies and finally an ache. "War" and "home" end the two stanzas as opposites, and the poem moves from the first to the second, from appetite to longing. The ache is also a kind of hunger, but a helpless one, set against the easy, confident hunger of the consumers.
The poem is significant for what it refuses to do. It names no particular war, place or army, so it can attach to almost any conflict. It does not lecture. Instead it keeps saying "we" and "our," with "our minds," "we eat" and "our creature," so that the reader sits inside the guilt rather than pointing at someone else. In a handful of words it turns the familiar idea of "consuming" news, images or history into something grotesque and literal, then lets one tender, aching line show what that consumption costs.