Nobody in "Slice and dice" actually chops anything, yet the whole poem happens in a kitchen of the mind. The title is an everyday cooking phrase, and Dave Bonta uses it as a doorway into something much less domestic. His central idea seems to be that some kinds of knowledge can't be gathered by looking. They come from being cut, from exposure, from letting pain teach what the eyes cannot.
The first couplet sets two things side by side without joining them: "summer like a cook / my eyes are poor company." There is no verb for summer, so the comparison hangs in the air. We can fill it in ourselves. Summer, like a cook, heats, ripens and transforms, and it turns everything it touches into something to be prepared. Then the poem swings inward, and the second line is wonderfully offhand. "Poor company" is what you might say about a dull dinner guest. The speaker's eyes, which ought to be delighted by a season so full of things to see, are bad companions. Judging by the tone, they may be tired, blurred or simply unable to grasp what is in front of them.
The second couplet is the turn, marked by a plain "but." "You my ache" speaks directly to a pain and makes it tender, almost a lover or friend. With no comma, "you my ache" sounds like a pet name, and the ache takes over the role the eyes failed at. It becomes the real companion. What it brings is knowledge: it "understood the blade." The past tense suggests the cutting has already happened, and the ache is what remains of it. The eyes only watch the knife, while the ache knows it from the inside.
The last couplet gives the poem its strangest and most open image: "dancing naked to know / the nature of lives." Who is dancing? Grammatically it floats free, and it could be the speaker, the ache, or even summer. That uncertainty helps the poem, because the dancer becomes anyone willing to be stripped of protection. In a kitchen, things are peeled before they are sliced, so nakedness here may hint at vulnerability before the blade. Dancing adds a sense of motion and even joy, as if knowledge arrives through the body moving rather than the mind observing. The word "lives" is plural, so the poem moves from "my eyes" and "my ache" to something shared. Though I am reading into the text here, "nature" may also quietly link back to summer, the natural world where the poem began.
The form works like the knife it describes. Three couplets, no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme leave the poem looking like pieces laid out on a board. The lines are short, running from four to seven syllables, and each stanza ends abruptly on "company," "blade" and "lives," as if cut off. Sound does the work that rhyme usually would. The long *a* runs through "ache," "blade," "naked" and "nature" and ties the last two couplets together. The hard *k* sound in "cook," "company" and "ache" links the kitchen to the hurt. Even "eyes" and "lives" nearly chime, faintly bracketing the poem between seeing and living.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a cliché of the kitchen and asks what it means to know something, and it answers with a startling claim: pain can be the better witness. The title's "dice" may also suggest the gambler's cubes, which would bring in chance, though that is one possible reading and not something the poem states. Bonta never explains his images. He leaves the cook, the blade and the dancer for us to connect, so we have to understand them the way the poem says understanding happens, through our own risk and not through simply looking.