Rowan Tate

HOW TO CUT A ROOT

Trace the white ropes of onion, its syntax of layers,
its vowels peeled down to the tremble. The knife knows
before I do where the flesh breaks clean. Every slice

sticky with its own sermon. The body multiplies its rings,
showing how a bruise knows its radius, how a memory
stays steeped despite the severing. I press down

and tears pustulate the offering. The body's logic
stung open. Skin comes off in sheer sheets, the reluctant
pink rash of blood beading through old wounds.

My grandmother chopped her prayers small and stirred
into everything. No one teaches you how to dice grief,
how to hold the bulb of the body steady while the

soft center folds in. You learn that the mouth cannot stop
opening. There is no straight line in longing. Matter spirals,
the holes won’t close. You hold your fingers out

to the surface of being like cut stems, feeling
for ingredients. The wound becomes a bowl becomes a
circle, but not the kind I can walk back into.

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