Nine short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Drag" looks as though it was written quietly, in one breath, before the day had properly started. The title, though, does a lot of work. "Drag" can mean the clothes and performance of drag, the slow pull of something heavy, even a drag on a cigarette. The poem lets these meanings rub against each other without choosing one.
The first pun sets the tone. "this morning / my mourning hands" depends on two words that sound identical, and the sound slips grief into an ordinary start to the day. The poem never says what is being mourned. The speaker simply wakes up already inside the feeling. The hands are the ones in mourning, and they "love nothing / but instructions." The line break matters here. After "love nothing" we pause, and for a moment the hands seem numb and loveless, until "but instructions" arrives to narrow the claim. It is a believable picture of grief. When thinking is too hard, a recipe is a comfort: step one, step two, no decisions required.
The second stanza turns that obedience into a trip. "begin their journey / towards a beautiful me / in makeup" is grammatically loose, since it is unclear whether the hands or the instructions are doing the beginning. That looseness keeps the speaker at a distance from their own actions, as if the body had taken over. "Journey" is a grand word for a morning routine, and the gap between the word and the task is both funny and touching. The face becomes a landscape to be crossed. "Towards" means the speaker hasn't arrived. "a beautiful me" is one possible self, not a given one, and "in makeup" lands last, almost deflating. The beauty is something worn. The word also splits into "make up", meaning to invent or compose, which fits a self being assembled. The repeated m sounds in "mourning", "me" and "makeup" bind grief, identity and cosmetics together.
The final stanza is the only abstract statement, and it is also the trickiest. Supply an implied "that" and it reads: belief is a necessity that no masters are afraid of. But who are the "masters"? One reading says they are experts, such as a master of any craft, who don't fear belief because they know every skill depends on it. A darker reading says they are people in power, who have no reason to fear belief because belief is what makes others follow instructions. That would loop back to the hands that love nothing else. The poem doesn't decide. It also ends on "of", a preposition with nothing after it, so the sentence leans forward unfinished, like the journey in the stanza before. Even the word "belief" has "lie" tucked inside it, which may be coincidence but fits the poem's interest in what is made versus what is true.
Formally, the poem is free verse in three tercets, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from the line breaks, and each short line works like a step, so the poem itself feels like a set of instructions being followed. The diction is plain and domestic, which makes "mourning", "journey" and "belief" stand out. Without ornament, the few large words carry real weight.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It suggests that a self is partly built, assembled by following steps and by choosing to believe in the result, and that this is what drag means at its root. It also refuses to set grief and artifice against each other. Putting on a face may be a way of getting through a morning of mourning, not a way of hiding from it. And the poem never tells us how to feel about any of this. It leaves us, like its speaker, in the middle of the process.