An afternoon goes into the pot, and what comes out is a row of crosses. In four short lines, Dave Bonta turns an ordinary domestic scene, a meal slowly cooking, into a small puzzle. The poem never tells us what supper actually is. It says only that supper "is / a fresh / string of Xs," and leaves us to decide what that could mean.
The title is the first clue. "Reduction" is a cook's word: you simmer a liquid for hours until the water leaves and only the concentrated essence remains. The poem does the same to its own language. The opening line, "all afternoon in the pot," is the longest and the most relaxed. The long vowels of "afternoon" and the slow, easy preposition phrase feel like time stretched out over a low flame. Then the lines shrink to "supper is," then "a fresh," as if the poem itself were boiling down. What remains is the thick residue of the final line. The poem acts out its title rather than just stating it.
That residue is the strange part. An X can be many things, and the poem refuses to choose. It might be the kisses at the end of a letter, which would make supper an act of affection. It might be the mark of something crossed out, a deletion, a mistake, a canceled plan. It could be the algebraic unknown, the thing you solve for, or the signature of someone who cannot write a name. Judging by the title, one reading is that the poem is about writing itself: a long afternoon of work, all that simmering and revising, ends in nothing but marks of erasure. Since the poem doesn't say, each reading remains possible, and the ambiguity is the point. The word "fresh" adds to it. We expect fresh vegetables or a fresh start, but a "fresh string of Xs" sounds like a clean page already scribbled on, or a new line of unknowns just set down.
The grammar helps the trick work. "Supper is" works almost like an equals sign, which suits the algebraic reading. The line break after "is" makes us wait, and then "a fresh" makes us wait again, so by the time "string of Xs" arrives we have been led to expect food. A "string" might make us think of string beans, or something threaded and hanging. We get letters instead. There is no punctuation and no capital at the start, so the poem seems to be still simmering rather than finished. The only capital letters in the body of the poem are the Xs, which stand out sharply against the lowercase text, like marks on a map.
The sound is quiet but deliberate. Hissing s-sounds run through "supper is a fresh string of Xs," and the final "Xs" is pronounced with a buzzing z. It is easy to hear steam in that, the soft noise of a pot kept at a simmer. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem relies on the pull of the line breaks and the way each short line falls away after the first long one.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It sets two kinds of making side by side, cooking and writing, and suggests they share a logic: both take time, both boil things down, and both can end in something that looks smaller than the effort behind it. It also makes the reader do some of the work. The poem hands us a set of symbols and no answer, and we have to decide whether the supper is a gift, a failure, or an unsolved problem. A poem this short could easily be a throwaway, but this one concentrates its meaning the way a good sauce concentrates flavor. The title promises reduction, and the poem keeps that promise.