Instagrammar — Summary

Dave BontaCheerful

with clean nails making a bit of meat in the kitchen all alone

I set down my days perfect from nature and got my first red likes

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A person alone in a kitchen prepares a small piece of meat, hands carefully clean, and photographs the result for social media. The title, a play on "Instagram" and "grammar," hints that posting has its own rules and language, and that the speaker is following them. The word "Instagrammar" also suggests the way we learn to arrange our lives into the right shape for an audience.

The speaker sounds quietly pleased, but there's an odd loneliness underneath. "All alone" sits at the end of the first stanza, and the second shows what fills that silence: the speaker "sets down" their days, as if writing them into a record, and calls them "perfect from nature." That phrase is ironic, since nothing here is natural once it's been staged. The reward is "red likes," a small jolt of approval that sounds almost like wounds or hearts. The mood is dry, a little comic, and faintly sad: a private moment turned into a performance.

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«Instagrammar» — poem summary Dave Bonta | PoemShip