Five flat statements, one question and a number that won't fit on its line: Chad Bowers builds this untitled poem from almost nothing, and the gaps do most of the talking. Nothing outside the page is needed to feel its strangeness, and the page is all I will rely on here.
It opens like a child's list of things known for certain. "The moon is a ball" is the kind of metaphor a small child makes without effort, and it rhymes with the next line, "Some kids live in the mall." The rhyme is the poem's one moment of singsong, and it works like a trap. Because the rhythm bounces ("THE MOON is a BALL / SOME KIDS LIVE in the MALL"), we expect something cheerful. Instead the second line states, in the same sing-along tone, that children live in a shopping centre. Whether that means literally living there or simply spending their lives there, the poem doesn't say. The rhyme also quietly links the two images: a ball is a toy, and a mall is a place built around buying things. One is far away in the sky, and the other is where these kids end up.
Then the music stops. The third line is longer and rhymeless, and it is broken in the middle by a full stop: "SOME WATER IS BLUE. BIRDS PREFER TREES." These are observations so obvious they seem pointless, yet two small words matter. "Some" is repeated, so water is blue only sometimes, and kids live in malls only some of the time, as if the speaker is carefully sorting the world into cases. "Prefer" gives birds a choice, a natural place that suits them. Set beside the kids in the mall, the line suggests that some creatures get to be where they belong and others don't, though the poem never says so outright. Moon, water, birds and trees are all natural things, and the mall is the single human-made thing among them. It is delivered with exactly the same calm.
The all-capital lettering supports that calm. Nothing is emphasised because everything is at the same volume. It could be a sign, a note or a shout, and the reader has to decide. The punctuation changes too. The first two lines have none and just roll on, while the third is chopped into short blocks, like someone pausing to think of the next thing to say.
After the stanza break the poem changes direction completely. A "he" appears, the only individual person in the text, along with a question: "DOES HE REALLY NEED IT." There is no question mark. The full stop turns the question into something flatter, perhaps weary, perhaps accusing, perhaps a thought the speaker has given up on. "It" has no explanation, so we land in the middle of a conversation or an argument we weren't present for. A reader might connect "need" with the mall and its goods, but that is a guess the text invites rather than confirms.
The final line, "IT FELT LIKE SEVENTY- / THREE YEARS," does the most with form. The number is split across the line break, so the reader has to wait for it to finish, and the poem acts out the very drag of time it describes. "THREE YEARS" is left alone on the last line, a small weight at the bottom of the page. The choice of seventy-three is also telling. It is oddly exact, with the ring of how people really exaggerate after a long wait or a dull, difficult day, and it is long enough to cover most of a life. The poem began with a metaphor about space (moon as ball) and ends with a simile about time (a moment as years), moving from the vast and distant to the personal and felt.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to explain. It places a moon, a mall, some birds, an unnamed man and an endless stretch of time next to one another and leaves the connections to us. The childlike language makes the unsettling line about the kids land harder, and the abrupt shift to "he" and "it" leaves a feeling of something unresolved. The poem never tells us whether to feel amused, sad or uneasy, and the reader's own answer to who "he" is and what "it" might be is part of the experience.