Eight short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Instagrammar" looks as casual as a caption, and that is part of its trick. Beneath the casual surface it describes a small transaction. A person alone in a kitchen makes something and turns the making into an image, and the image earns a reward. The central idea is how easily private, solitary life becomes material for display, and how quickly the display starts to feel like the point.
The title is the best place to start. "Instagrammer" is the ordinary word for someone who uses the platform. Bonta changes one letter and gets "grammar," the system of rules that tells us how sentences work. The poem then behaves like a grammar lesson. The first stanza has no main verb at all. It is a string of dangling phrases: "with clean nails / making a bit of meat / in the kitchen / all alone." We wait for a subject and don't get one until the second stanza, when "I" finally arrives with "set down my days." The delay feels like a pose being arranged before the shutter clicks. The speaker is a scene first and a person second.
The details in that scene are carefully chosen. "Clean nails" is a strange thing to mention when someone is handling raw meat. It suggests hands that are being looked at, presentable and tidy, hands prepared for an audience. Then there is "making a bit of meat." The poem doesn't say "cooking dinner" or "preparing a meal." "Making" sounds almost like crafting an object, and "a bit of meat" is so vague and modest that it hardly sounds like a meal anyone would eat. Judging by the wording, the food matters less than the picture of it. Then comes the flat, quiet "all alone." Nothing in the poem calls it sad, but placing the phrase at the end of the stanza lets it settle there.
The second stanza is where the poem's irony sharpens. "I set down my days" can mean writing them down, but it also means putting something down, like a plate or a burden, so that the speaker's days become objects to be placed on display. They are "perfect from nature," a phrase that is pleasingly hard to pin down. It echoes "fresh from nature" or "straight from nature," the language of authenticity, yet "perfect" is exactly what real days rarely are. The speaker may be sincere or may be quietly mocking the filtered, curated idea of the natural. The poem doesn't say, and that deadpan tone keeps the reader alert.
The sound of the poem is subtler than its lack of rhyme suggests. There is no regular meter. The lines run from two to five syllables, and the poem's rhythm is the stop-start pace of scrolling or of a spoken aside. But the long *a* sound runs through it like a thread: *nails*, *making*, *days*, *nature*. The soft *k* in *kitchen* and *likes* links the place of making to the reward. The final line, "red likes," is only two syllables, and the poem ends abruptly, as a notification does.
That last image is the richest. The "red" most obviously recalls the red heart that signals approval on a screen. But it also echoes the meat in the first stanza, and the repetition may not be accidental. Something raw and bodily is reappearing as something digital. The word "first" matters too. Stranded at the end of its line, "my first" suggests a beginning, the taste of a reward that invites more. The poem doesn't moralize about what follows. It simply lets the satisfaction sit there, a little too pleased.
What makes the poem significant is that compression. In eight lines it captures a feeling that many readers will recognize: doing something in private and almost automatically imagining how it will look to others. It doesn't lecture about social media or call the speaker foolish. It records the sequence of events (hands, kitchen, days, likes) and lets the gaps between them speak. The loneliness of the kitchen and the thrill of the red hearts sit side by side, and the reader is left to decide whether one cures the other or only covers it up.