Fifteen syllables are all Dave Bonta needs to make a whole argument about what it means to live in a body. "Bilateral" has no verbs, no punctuation and no capital letters, yet it moves from a condition ("in health / in fever") to a confession ("my mouth full / of wants") to a verdict ("one body / two gods"). The speaker never says what the wants are, or who the gods are. The poem lets the body and its appetites stand there, unexplained.
The first two lines sound like a half-remembered vow. "In health" nudges the ear toward the marriage promise "in sickness and in health", though that link is my inference, not something the poem states. If the echo is intended, the changes matter. The order is reversed, so health comes first, and "sickness" becomes "fever". Sickness is a general, clinical word. Fever is hot and physical, and it has a second life in language as a word for desire, as in "feverish" longing. So the phrase slides between illness and craving before the poem has named either. Whether the speaker is well or burning up, the next line reports the same thing: a mouth full of wants.
That image is the poem's strangest and best. "My mouth full" can stand alone for a moment, the way it would if someone were stuffing food in, and then "of wants" arrives and spoils the picture. Fullness and lack occupy the same space. Wants are by definition things not yet had, but here they are packed in like a meal. The mouth is also a well-chosen place for them. It is where we eat, speak, kiss and pray, so the wants might be appetites, words or requests. The plural matters as well. The speaker has "wants", not one grand "desire", and the word sounds small, restless and a little childish, like a list that never gets shorter.
The final pair of lines supplies the title's logic. "Bilateral" means two-sided, as in bilateral symmetry or bilateral talks between two parties, and "one body / two gods" turns that into a claim about the self. The numbers are the whole contrast: one against two. A single body can be pulled in two directions by two powers. The poem does not say which, so readers can fill in the gap. The gods could be health and fever, or body and spirit, or two competing hungers. Because they are gods, not impulses, they also demand something. A mouth full of wants starts to look like a mouth full of petitions, and the speaker becomes a worshipper with no way to satisfy both deities.
The poem's shape reinforces this. Each line is two or three syllables, and in my reading the first stanza runs 2-3-3-2, a mirror-image pattern that is bilateral in its own structure. The closing couplet shifts to 3-2, and the poem ends on a short, hard syllable, "gods". Each pair of lines adds up to five syllables, which gives three tidy units and an even, balanced pulse. There is no rhyme at the ends of lines. The music is quieter and sits inside the words. "Fever" and "full" share an opening f, "health" and "mouth" both finish on the breathy th, and "one" and "wants" start with the same w sound, so the oneness of the body and the wanting that disturbs it are linked by sound.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it declines to say. Many poems about illness treat sickness as a crisis that changes the self. Here the wanting is constant, and it does not go away when the speaker recovers. Desire is not a symptom of fever or a reward of health. It is simply the condition of being a body. The short lines and the white space around them suggest that this doesn't need elaborating. The poem lists its terms and then closes on the paradox of one body and two gods, which keeps working in the mind long after the page is turned.