Most of the work in Dave Bonta's poem is done by a word that sits above the text rather than inside it. "Issue" can mean to flow out, the way water issues from a spring. It can mean offspring, as in the old legal phrase about dying without issue. It can also mean a problem, or a single edition of a magazine. The poem plays on the first two senses and leaves the others humming in the background. Its idea is simple and unsettling: the world keeps producing things, and the speaker, by the last line, produces nothing.
The first stanza gives us "from the river / a cold body." The phrase is deliberately double. A "body" of water is ordinary language for a river or lake, but "cold" nudges the word toward something grimmer, a corpse the river has given up. Either way, the river is cast as a source, a kind of parent, and what it brings forth is chilly and still. Judging by the imagery, even this first act of "issuing" is tinged with death.
The second stanza turns to something kinder: "from each flower a fruit / a perfect stranger." Flowers turning into fruit is about as natural and productive as life gets, yet the poem refuses to let it be comforting. A fruit looks nothing like the blossom it grew from, so the offspring is unrecognisable to its source. "Perfect stranger" is a stock phrase, and Bonta lets both halves work. "Perfect" suggests complete, ripe, flawless, while "stranger" says that what you make is no longer yours. Notice, too, that the poem never calls the fruit sweet or good. It simply arrives.
Then comes the shortest stanza, a single line: "from me no one." The poem has been impersonal until now, and the pronoun "me" lands like a door closing. The line is almost entirely one-syllable words, blunt after the longer "river," "flower" and "perfect stranger." "No one" is cleverly chosen over "nothing," because the earlier stanzas were full of person-words. A body is a person, though a dead one. A stranger is a person, though an unknown one. "No one" is the absence of a person altogether. Read in sequence, the three stanzas thin out from corpse to stranger to nobody.
The construction supports this. The stanzas shrink from two lines to two lines to one, so the poem seems to run out of breath. Each begins with "from," an anaphora that works like a drumbeat and sets up the pattern the last line breaks. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short lines of roughly four to six syllables. The poem has no punctuation or capitals either, so nothing marks where one thought ends. There is not a single verb in it. That is where the title comes in: "Issue" quietly supplies the missing action, so the verb sits outside the poem, as if the speaker cannot bring it inside. The grammar copies the content, with a sentence that cannot complete itself.
Sound adds a quieter layer. "From each flower a fruit" is stitched together by its f sounds, which gives the line a light, easy fluency, as if making things came naturally. The rounded vowels of "cold body" return in "no one," so the final line echoes the first stanza's grimness while stripping away its images. By the end the poem has lost its river and its flower, and only a voice is left.
The poem's significance lies in how much it holds in so little space. It never says whether the speaker is mourning childlessness, a creative drought, or simply mortality, and the title allows all of these readings, including the thought of a poem that fails to come. Judging by the text alone, it would be a mistake to pin it to one backstory. The gap between the generous river and flower and the empty "me" is what the reader feels, and that feeling works whichever loss we imagine. A poem about not producing turns out to be a small, finished thing, and the contrast gives the last line its sting.