This week on the Influence: Onions!

Seriously: in keeping with last week’s post, I have decided to share this poem of mine, “Onions”, which was also revised after publication.  The original of this poem found a home at The Windward Review.  It came out of a writing exercise where I wrote about something I hated.  The original focused mainly on the graphic nature of chopping up onions.

What I feel is better in this revision is how the poem takes on a human element by becoming an elegy.

The line “dish I was told you liked” was in the original but wasn’t fully developed.  In looking back, I realized – Whoa, there’s a person in this poem completely unacknowledged.

Another revision: I have since made my peace with onions.  Bring on the pico de gallo!

Onions – Jose Angel Araguz *

The bulb, hard and heavy as a fist,
The slivers that unravel like the wings
And body of an albino cockroach,

The sharp stink
Of its flesh spitting
Against the blade —

I could do without
This unwelcome act of reducing
A ghost to paper shavings

For a dish I was told you liked,
That I persist in making
Despite your absence,

Except that I believe
That what gathers
And falls from my eyes

Is a part of you
Hungry to come back
To this table.

***

Happy tabling!

jose

* originally published in The Windward Review.