Peeling Onions

The kitchen tries to say something today—

yellow-thick moong dal canopying a heap of plain basmati
resembles the skin of the endangered Panamanian Golden Frog.

Butt-faced bananas hang from their stem like blind bats.
Onionskins shimmer like Diwali gift-wrappers.

Headless broccoli stalks mimic trees. And potatoes grow eyes.
A quiet stack of ceramic quarter-plates sits in codependent harmony.

One sunk inside the hold of the other, one groove dug into the next
like a coastal shelf or like genealogy: a growing deposit of habit

from a century-worth of ancestors that sits inside me.
We sit for lunch, and we take turns with the paper.

Like we take turns to orbit each other through the house.
Sometimes Ma mocks the spoons for they’re too big

for her bowl. Or Dadu questions the truth behind
a compliment. And sometimes I wail like a squawking bald eagle:

disempowered and majestic, both at the same time.
What was spoken is forgotten. But these mishaps happen

only at mealtime.     And so the kitchen finally speaks.
I peel an onion. The more I peel, the more relentlessly its sweet

sting hits the eye (sweet because it is familiar like an old argument
sanded with time). Each one of us is a bursting backlog of unsaid prayer.

There comes a point after which gratitude becomes an old, soiled dishcloth:
its true colour— altered. Perhaps the kitchen is saying:

arguments work like onions too. The more you unwrap word after word
in the hunt for intention or whatnot you read in that self-help book,

the more it will sting. I unwrap the rings of perfect, pink elliptical shine
one after the other      until I find nothing.