Ten words and a one-word title: that is all Dave Bonta gives us, and it is enough to fill a whole morning. Somebody, known to us only as "her", has been holding something for hours, and what she holds is impossible: "a sea with one fish." Nobody explains how an ocean fits into a pair of hands. That refusal to explain is where the poem gets its power.
The title is the quiet key. The poem never says "salt", and a sea is salty already, so the title might look redundant. But it moves our attention from the sea's size to its substance: the grain, the sting, the taste. Salt preserves a fish, and salt is in tears, and the poem leaves both doors open. Judging by the imagery, we might be watching someone pack a single fish in salt, so that the "sea" is what she has made in her hands. Or we might be watching someone carry sorrow, the salt water of grief gathered in cupped palms. Neither reading cancels the other, and the text gives no evidence for choosing between them.
The construction is as bare as the content. There is no verb anywhere. "all morning in her hands" is a fragment, and since we never learn what the hands are doing (holding, washing, salting, shielding), we supply the action ourselves. The lowercase opening and the absence of punctuation add to the effect. The poem seems to begin in the middle of a morning already under way, and it stops without closing the door behind it. The line break after "hands" works like a small piece of stagecraft. We expect an object that fits a palm, a stone or a cup or a bird, and the next line gives us a sea. The scale shifts in the space of a breath.
The rhythm is quiet but not accidental. The first line runs six syllables with a gentle rocking pulse, leaning on "morning" and "hands". The second has five and ends on "one fish", two stresses side by side, so the line slows and settles like something heavy set down on a table. There is no rhyme. What binds the lines is sound: the hushing s of "sea" and the sh of "fish" give the poem a wet, whispering texture, as if the words were lapping.
Word choice carries the meaning. "All" and "one" sit at opposite ends of the poem, totality against singularity: all morning, one fish. And "with" is the smallest and most interesting word. A sea "with" one fish is not a sea full of fish. It is a sea emptied down to a single life, or a sea that matters only because of that life. Either way, the wide world has contracted to something you could lose between your fingers. Meanwhile "her hands" keeps the poem human-sized. The sea has no horizon here, only two palms and the patience of a morning spent looking after what lies in them.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without announcing it. It builds a metaphor with no "like" or "as" and trusts us to accept the impossible as simply true. In doing so it suggests that attention can change the size of things: care can shrink an ocean to something holdable, or swell one fish until it becomes a whole sea. The poem also shifts on rereading, because each pass gives the hands a different task. It won't tell you who she is or why she has been standing there since dawn. It asks you to stay with her a moment longer, and in a poem this short, that request is the whole point.