Onions: The Poetry Telepaths, by Paul Driscoll

In root cellar gloom, they huddle. Onions. Whispering verse in dialect of tear and soil. You chop one for dinner, unaware it’s broadcasting elegies straight into your skull. “Just sulphur,” you sniff, eyes slick as wet pavement. But they know. Each layer peels back a stanza, each ring a rhyming couplet from the enzyme subconscious. At market, they sit in crates, silent yet screaming sestinas. Heaney’s ghost nods digging through peat. He'd bought a bag of onions and bled verse into the receipt. Later, alone, the onions hum melancholy haiku, and somewhere, a man weeps without knowing why, bread unbuttered.