Six short lines, no punctuation, and a single letter of the alphabet: Dave Bonta's "Ex" is a poem about something almost too small to notice, the mark we make when we cross two strokes. It uses that mark to ask what it means to put yourself on paper, and what is left over once you have done it.
The title does the first piece of work. "Ex" is how we say the letter x aloud, but it is also the word for a former partner, and the prefix meaning "out of" or "former." So before the poem starts, the reader already holds three meanings: a letter, a past relationship, and something left behind. The poem never says which one it means, and the title leaves room for all of them.
The first couplet is plain and practical: "an x made / to sign letters." The x here is a signature. It is a mark for someone who stands in for a name, or perhaps the kiss that closes a note. Notice that the line break after "made" lets the phrase "an x made" sit alone for a beat, as if the letter were being created as we read. The poem is a small act of drawing as well as a statement.
Then comes the poem's cleverest move: "a contrary meeting / of I and I." If you look at an x as two strokes, each one is a kind of "I," a single upright line, leaned over and laid across the other. "Contrary" is a good word for this. It means opposed, but it also suggests crossing paths against the grain. The x becomes two selves meeting in disagreement, and the capital "I" repeated on the page gives the pun a visual force. "I and I" also sounds like "eye and eye," two gazes meeting, though that is an inference from the sound and not something the poem says outright.
The final couplet turns from the page to the garden. The x is "standing in for the second self," which is a striking phrase. A signature is a substitute for the writer, a stand-in that can travel where the person cannot. Here that substitute is called a *second* self, a double. Then the poem swerves with "that ivy in the garden." Without punctuation, the grammar stays open. The ivy might be a second thing the x stands in for, or the second self might be the ivy, a comparison dropped in without explanation. The missing comma is deliberate, or at least productive, because it lets the two ideas fuse.
Ivy suits the poem well. It climbs by crossing and recrossing itself, so its tendrils make x-shapes naturally. It clings to walls and refuses to leave, which fits the word "ex" in its sense of a former partner who lingers, or a former self that keeps growing back. Read this way, the poem begins with a mark made on purpose and ends with something that grows on its own, past the point where anyone controls it.
The poem's structure supports this. There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is loose, but the lines slowly lengthen: three syllables in "an x made," then four, then six in "a contrary meeting," and finally seven in "standing in for the second self." The poem starts clipped and spreads out, a little like ivy taking over a wall. Three couplets give it a tidy, almost lattice-like shape, and the enjambment across each pair keeps the thought moving forward without a full stop to close it. The poem never ends in a sentence. It simply trails off into the garden.
What makes "Ex" worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It treats the humblest of marks as a riddle with several answers: a signature, a kiss, a divided self, a lost partner, a plant. Its central idea is that when we represent ourselves, whether by signing a name or by remembering who we used to be, we make a second self who is partly us and partly something else. The poem leaves that idea unresolved, and the reader is the one who has to decide which meaning of "ex" to keep.