Stare at a face long enough and it stops being a face. Dave Bonta's "Trip" starts from that odd moment of estrangement. The speaker "wandered through her face" until it "grew abstract as a map," and what follows is a survey of unfamiliar ground. The central idea, as I read it, is that intense looking can turn intimacy into distance. The closer the speaker gets, the less he sees a person and the more he sees terrain, something to chart, measure and use. The poem never says whether this feels like love, desire or unease, and that uncertainty is what makes it linger.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short, uneven lines of about four to six syllables, which makes the poem seem to pick its way across the page. The whole thing is a single sentence. It drifts from clause to clause with no full stop, linked by four ampersands, so the speaker's wandering never gets to rest. The ampersand is also a mapmaker's shorthand, a quick abbreviation, and it adds to the clipped, diagrammatic feel. Near the end a colon arrives: "here / the skyline of incisors." It works like a finger landing on the map and saying *look at this*, and the line break after "here" gives that gesture a small pause.
The imagery is the heart of the poem, and it asks the reader to decode the face. Judging by the details, the "lightly drawn roads / & rivers in faint blue" suggest fine lines and veins under the skin. The "blank spaces where hills separated" zones may be the plain, unmarked areas of cheek and brow, and the "quarry-holes for sound & for scent" seem to be ears and nostrils. At the bottom, "a beltway in red" fits the lips, and the "skyline of incisors" fits the teeth. The poem never names a single feature. That refusal is what keeps the face abstract, and the reader has to do the same work of translation the speaker has done.
The vocabulary is also telling. A map could be drawn in gentle words, but Bonta chooses the language of industry: "zones of resource extraction," "quarry-holes," "settling ponds." The senses become mines, and the body becomes something to be dug out and used. Hearing and smell are described as holes, as absences left behind after material has been removed. The phrase "settling ponds / of an unsettling color" turns on a quiet pun, where "settling" slides into "unsettling." The sound shifts the poem's mood in the middle of a line. Up to that point the map has been faint and pale, in blues and blank spaces. Now something toxic seeps into it.
The ending changes the scale again, from landscape to city. Past the red beltway lies "the dark & pulsating / inner city beyond." The teeth are towers, and the mouth becomes a place that is crowded and alive, but also hidden and perhaps dangerous. "Pulsating" brings the body back into the poem for the first time, because the map suddenly has a heartbeat. The inner city is the one part of the face that cannot be flattened onto paper, and the poem stops at its edge, without going in.
The title adds a further layer. "Trip" can mean a journey, which fits the wandering, and it can mean a hallucination, which fits the way the face warps into something strange. It can also mean a stumble, a slip in perception. The poem suggests all three without insisting on any of them.
What makes "Trip" worth reading is how much it does in so few lines. It takes a familiar experience, looking closely at another person, and shows how the act can quietly turn into possession and exploitation. The gaze starts as tender wandering, and by the end it is a survey, with zones, resources and a district the speaker hesitates to enter. The poem leaves the reader wondering whether this is wonder or trespass, and whether the speaker is a traveler or a prospector.