Dave Bonta's "Artifactual" begins as a riddle and ends as an elegy. Its opening question treats a breakup as a problem in symbolic housekeeping: "When a relationship dies, what happens / to the orphaned plus sign?" The poem never mentions the lovers, their quarrel, or their grief. It follows a mathematical symbol as it drifts through the culture, and the person who lost the relationship appears only as a faint pressure behind the jokes.
The central move is a visual pun. A plus sign is a cross, so the poem can slide from arithmetic into a whole inventory of crosses: the "cemetery cross / marking some otherwise dubious grave," the "TV antenna mast," the "minimal / skeleton of a scarecrow," the crossroads, the crucifix. The list is carefully ordered. Each object belongs to a shared world that is fading, from rooftops and rural fields to old folk geography. The poem says as much when it notes that "even crossroads seem archaic." By the time it reaches the crucifix, the cross has shrunk to "a piece of jewelry / to finger in times of stress." The word "finger" is repeated and then turned into a verb of nervous habit ("finger & twirl on its chain"). A sacred symbol has become a worry bead, something to hold when you're anxious. The "dubious grave" is a nice touch too. It suggests a grave whose occupant is uncertain, which fits a relationship that may not have deserved a monument, or may not be quite dead.
The strangest image comes at the end of that stretch: the crucifix is "a thing humans wear / instead of a bell." A bell hangs on a grazing animal or a wandering cat so that others can hear it coming. The line makes us look like creatures who have swapped a sound for a silent charm. A church bell once called people together, and now each person carries a private, quiet cross. I'm reading here, but the image seems to carry the poem's larger idea: symbols that once joined people have become small personal comforts.
The poem's form supports this. It is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter, and the sentences spill across line breaks in a conversational, slightly deadpan way. The break after "Now" leaves the word hanging, so the shift from past possibility to present decline arrives with a small jolt. The ampersands ("& a crucifix," "finger & twirl," "& merge") give the page a casual, handwritten look, like notes jotted down rather than a carefully polished statement. Underneath the casual surface there is plenty of sound-patterning. The hard c-sounds of "cemetery cross," "crossroads," "archaic," and "crucifix" knock against each other like a repeated tapping, and "minimal / skeleton of a scarecrow" crackles with s and k sounds that make the bare image feel brittle.
The last sentence is where the poem turns. "In extreme cases, the plus sign / can lose its vertical axis / & merge with the horizon." Take away the upright stroke and the plus becomes a flat line, a minus, and the word "horizon" echoes "horizontal" so the geometry and the landscape become one image. The clinical phrase "in extreme cases" sounds like a medical note. Then "beyond which, as we know, / there's nothing but subtraction" arrives with a dry "as we know" that invites the reader to agree. The final word, "subtraction," lands like a closing door. Loss here is arithmetic: what's taken away leaves less, and the lines before it have already shown that the cross can no longer hold up the weight of meaning.
The title adds to this. "Artifactual" suggests an artifact, an object left behind and examined later, as if the plus sign were being dug up by archaeologists of a vanished relationship. The poem's wit is how long it keeps its composure. It jokes about scarecrows and jewelry while the real subject, the emptiness after love, stays offstage. That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It lets a plain symbol carry the grief, and by the end the reader has felt the loss without being told how to feel it.