Four short scenes about eating, and none of them is really about food. Dave Bonta's "Eaters" travels from a noodle bar to a vegetarian's leather coat, then to a list of folk beliefs and a painting in a Madrid museum. In each, putting something in your mouth turns out to involve language, ethics, superstition or violence. The central idea comes in the last two lines, "learning how wholly consumption / can consume us." Eating is never a private, innocent act, because it eventually works on the eater too.
The first section is the funniest and the gentlest. The speaker remembers being the "queer foreigner / who talked like a child," missing the word the construction workers are trying to teach him. The payoff is delayed by the line breaks: "when all they wanted to hear / was an audible slurp." Eating here is a social language, and the speaker is too self-conscious to speak it. Section 2 shifts to someone who has a strict code. "I don't eat anything / without a face," she says, and even a tomato must have enough personality to bite "back." Her ethics are playful, but the image of her "hugg[ing] / herself tighter" in a black coat "draped over her bones" suggests that this principle has costs. Her capital "I" also stands out among the speaker's own lowercase ones, which may signal how sure of herself she is.
Section 3 piles up "they say" claims: chanterelles that let you hear "what the worms are whispering," ginseng that gives you "very expensive piss," bark you can eat when starving. The tone slides from eerie to deflating to grim. The worms are the most unsettling detail, since they are the creatures that eat us in the end. Then the speaker turns on himself: "i feed the serpent in my gut / nothing but eggs." Calling hunger a serpent makes the body a creature to be placated. The plain word "eggs" is a small joke, since eggs are what snakes steal, but it also prepares the confession that follows.
That confession opens section 4, where "i'll have / the usual" is the language of a diner regular. Against this routine the speaker sets the phrase "delectable products / of animal misery." The words "delectable" and "misery" collide, and the poem lets them sit together. "Comfort food / isn't it" sounds like a shrug, but the question tag is defensive. Then comes Goya's "two old people / eating soup at the Prado." The poem doesn't describe the painting, so we must remember it: one of Goya's dark late works, and a bleak way to show a meal. The speaker places the visit "a year after the death / of the butcher / of Guernica." I'd infer this means Franco, which would put the visit in 1976, though the poem never says so. The word "butcher" links meat and political violence. The twelve-year-old is "shocked / at the potential horror / in something so primordial," seeing what a child can see and an adult learns not to: ordinary consumption always has some violence behind it.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed meter. Its short, mostly two-line stanzas and heavy enjambment ("construction / workers," "bites / back") make it read like a series of hesitations, as if the speaker were chewing each phrase. Numbered sections let the jumps between Japan, folklore and Spain go unexplained, and the reader has to make the connections. The closing wordplay on "consumption" and "consume" ends the poem on a stark and unsettling note. It leaves us unable to eat "the usual" with quite the same ease.