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I'm Dave Bonta, a poet and literary magazine editor from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.

• Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!

  
  Order from the press or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.

• Recent Posts

  • Woodrat podcast 18: Clayton Michaels
  • Feast time
  • Gibbous
  • Black cherry: tree of affliction
  • Turtle words
  • iPaddy
  • An American Tune
  • Compost
  • Return to The Hook
  • The Yes Men Fix "Inception"
  • Nemesis
  • Literary journals in the age of the internet
  • Crickets
  • Lepidoptera: haiku
  • Confession of the Professional Left

• Recent Comments

  • Interview on the Woodrat Podcast « (till human voices wake us and we drown) on Woodrat podcast 18: Clayton Michaels
  • Dave Bonta on Feast time
  • David Harmon on Feast time
  • Dave on Feast time
  • Linda in TX on Gibbous
  • Deb on Feast time
  • Dave Bonta on Feast time
  • Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Feast time

• Series

  • Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life
  • Poetics and Technology
  • Bestiary
  • Banjo Poems
  • Honduran poetry
  • The Tempations of Solitude
  • Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems
  • Postcards from a Conquistador
  • Public Poems
  • Odes to Tools
  • Blogging the Appalachians
  • Self-Portraits
  • Cibola (epic poem)

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    • Pennsylvania (57)
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  • Unsorted early posts (421)
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  • Woodrat Podcast (18)

• Random Greatest Hits

  • Sacrifice
  • Bear lines
  • Paths of infection
  • Like Kyogen’s stone
  • Triptych

• 

• Search

• Smorgasblog

  • Metaphors for the Moon
    Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
    of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.

  • Cleaning My Attic
    Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...

  • Clumps and Voids
    The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.

  • botanizing
    On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.

  • The Twitching Line
    My uncle, gutting a fish:
    removing the fins from either side,
    tipping the knife below

    the little anus, pointing the tail-
    end away, slitting it to the gills,
    then plunging in a hand

    to scoop the organs out, soft
    and scarlet as a litter of kittens.

  • The Ordinary and the Wild
    I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

  • Busily Seeking... Continual Change
    So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.

  • Chatoyance
    And on the other side, what I
    set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
    a crease scored in bent blades of grass
    where I forgot the wall stood,
    my footsteps blurring as the
    grass unbends.

  • Velveteen Rabbi
    There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.

  • Will Buckingham
    My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.

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• "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
  — Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.