Fall Onions

Onion’s skin very thin,
Mild winter coming in;
Onion’s skin thick and tough,
Coming winter cold and rough.
—Gardener’s Rhyme

Take this one on the cutting board—
it sneers at the knife, gives up its skin
one smidge at a time.

I’m late-autumnal too, and so thin-skinned
I swathe myself against the chill.
Whatever’s nicking away at the layers of my life
is doing it mildly, fragment by fragment,
slowly prepping me for the winter stew pot.

O for a thick covering to save me
from this niggling disintegration.
And when the season’s cold and rough
let a big knife strip it off
suddenly and whole.

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Patricia Zylius is the author of the chapbook, Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Catamaran Literary Reader, Passager, Sequestrum, Juniper, Ellipsis, Natural Bridge, Red Wheelbarrow, and other journals, and on the Women’s Voices for Change website. Her poems have also been included in Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, In Plein Air, Women Artists Datebook, and The Yes Book.