Dave Bonta's "Slum" never shows us a slum. There are no broken windows, no washing lines, no children in the street. What we get is thirteen lines of fragments, and the poem builds its picture of poverty out of what has been bought, buried and lost rather than what can be seen.
It opens with a phrase that has no subject and no main verb: "collecting people bought / or sold formerly." Who is collecting? The poem doesn't say, and the vagueness is useful. The verb belongs to the language of stamps or specimens, so people become items in a catalogue. The word "formerly" is the trap. It sits at the end of the stanza and could mean that buying and selling people is over, or only that the label has changed while the arrangement survives. A slum is where people end up gathered together because of what they can't afford, and the poem hints that this is an old kind of trade under a new name. The next stanza supports the hint: "the city is anything but new / hot and not safe to go in." The heat and the danger are given flatly, with the near-rhyme of "hot" and "not" closing the line like a door.
The poem's emotional centre comes next, in a question that is oddly phrased: "but who buries his child / without a void." We expect grief to be named, and instead we get an absence. "Void" works in two ways. It is the hole in the ground and the hole in the parent. The question is also close to rhetorical, since nobody buries a child without feeling that emptiness. The little word "but" suggests an argument against whoever finds the slum merely loathsome or alien. The people there feel what anyone would feel.
Then the poem turns to "I": "night has been born / in my microscope." This is the strangest image, and probably the most important. The microscope stands for the observer's tools, such as study, classification and a safe distance. Yet looking closely does not clear anything up. What the instrument produces is night. The verb "born" also answers the burial two lines earlier, so a child is buried and darkness is delivered in the same breath. The speaker is no neutral researcher. His careful looking ends in blindness, or at least in an admission that scrutiny is not understanding.
The fifth stanza, "that end of town / among loathsome houses," sounds like a polite person pointing out where not to walk. "Loathsome" is a strong, slightly old-fashioned word, and the thick *l* and *s* sounds make the houses seem to sag. The poem lets this judgment stand without agreeing to it, and the final stanza takes it apart.
That last stanza is the only tercet in a poem of couplets, so the form itself seems to swell for the ending. "Come see the dead" is an invitation, and it could be a tour guide's, a preacher's or a neighbour's, each with a different moral weight. The closing lines, "how we are divided / that were so long together," shift from "I" to "we." The distance of the microscope disappears. The "dead" may be the literal dead, or the living who have been cut off from each other, and the poem lets both readings stand. The long vowels of "so long together" slow the line down and give it the sound of a lament. What is lost is not just life but companionship.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme scheme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so no sentence ever closes with authority. The lines lean on each other in ways that keep slipping, which suits a subject made of crowding and disconnection. The phrasing is so clipped and unusual that it reads as if the lines were gathered rather than composed, which fits the opening image of collecting.
The poem matters because it refuses the easy move. It would be simple to describe squalor and invite pity. Instead it sets commerce, grief and the failure of detached observation side by side, and then makes the reader answer the invitation to "come see." By the end we are standing inside the "we" that the poem says has been divided, and it leaves us to decide whether we belong to the slum or to the people who have been looking at it.