I
Ascending rows of little onions, butts

in grooves,

their shedded skins like exoskeletons.

Vacant

and dry, protecting nothing, at what point is a skin

no longer

a skin? This skin never wrinkles, it is always morning

in the supermarket.

2.50 a kilo but the skins are free. So are the paper bags

which

also provide a thin brown layer between a world

and a smaller world.

I place a few onion skins into a bag, it becomes the skin

encasing the skin.




II
There are many ways to organise a pantry, by

name, date, colour

or the dewey decimal system. This one is an index

of places—

I am a place, a portable place—says a skin when I open the bag

its topography

of bald globes a coppery contour of absence. At around

912

I transfer them into a bag containing a crowd already—an atlas

of onion skins.




III
Shelves are blank, expressionless in fact

the entire

green grocer is empty like a cracked egg. The only

residue, fragments

of stained glass onion skin. I run

my thumb

around the inner shell like my grandmother would, that last drop

suspended.




IV
(That same grandmother had a habit of tying knots

in her hankies

little reminders lest she forget something.

It puzzled me

how this technology worked, how were the words contained

in the snot

knots embroidered with flowers and initials, and

how many knots

could amass in a pocket, and be carried from one place

to another?)




V
Another empty greengrocer, the greengrocer

cicada

sticks to the side of a gum stripping

its bark. So

named for its colour, it also vacates its outer layer

although

first it must exit the earth. The cicada repeatedly revises

its edges—

the first time is always the hardest. A crisp absence

a memory

in brackets. I’d like to know what it is like

to shed

your skin, to draw yourself a new outline.




VI
Lentils carrot celery onion garlic oregano bay

leaf

diced tomatoes stock and olive oil

is a recipe

for soup handed to me by mouth, you don’t need

quantities

apparently. I’ll take any excuse to peel

an onion

and sweep the skins off the edge of the board

into my pocket

until I open the pantry where I find

the same

old paper bag now soft with creases

and onion smell.




VII
A skin is a noun and a noun a skin, lonely

and deciduous.

I thought nouns were heavy but these skins

are light, several

bagfuls make only fifty grams. I fill a stainless steel pot

with

cool water but when its warm it brews like a bruise.

A pigment

will sit but dye gets beneath a surface. It has no skin

of its own

so it seeps into things. After one hour I drain

the dark liquor

and discard the skins—dark, soggy

and exhausted.