Oignon brûlé
- Mar 24, 2023
- 3 min read
by Sam Moe
1.
You arrive at the greenhouse past midnight to purchase vegetables for the confit. The day hasn’t begun, you bear a lantern in one hand, emptied seafood bin in the other. The nursery smells sweet, the only sound your hands hooking light to the wall, hair falling in front of your right eye, hush of cotton pants creasing as you bend to pluck mustard greens. Too soon night will end, you’ll appear, bleary-eyed and covered in soot, ready for the menu. Your attitude problem is better this way — who wouldn’t love you half-asleep in faded pants, lost the buttons on your coat, your tattoos are fading and only the bartender touches the small of your back.
2.
Lace and lettuce, cool weather bundled the peas, the fields beyond reach a precipice of forests whose hills become slopes, dips of mud, a root-infested path overlooking the lake. Mourning doves shouldn’t be awake, but they are. There are howls, bug clicks, the entrance door swinging gently open and closed from the wind. You think you’ll see her, but she’s gone, turned into a breeze, her petunias have died, her eyes are deep and bottle green onions, Perna canaliculus the color of a field in your dreams, you remember she used to tell you bivalves were hearts, she slept with a bucket of clams near her bed, she has gone again, she might be back. One never knows when it comes to Manhattan.
3.
Enough with mozzarella water shots, no twists left so it’s time to honey-glue seeds to pear galette glass, you’re the underdog, the best sous chef, eating shallot-coated sourdough thinking it might save you but you want it to be her, please say you didn’t forget the feeling of shoulders brushing at dinner, please heal, reveal the true color of your irises, you’re no good regardless but you’ll put on a show. Been writing to her and her alone, she knows you understand, it’s New York City baby and all hearts are coated in neon light. You don’t know who will replace you, you are hell-born, evening horse, gliding through a twenty-top and stuffing money under cushions, you love hot spoons, new spatulas, you have a special scope for ambition, you’re best at the three-plate carry, you tell her you still want to be friends.
4.
I am in the dry storage labeling jars of beans and weeds when you enter. Long night, you say, laughing in that brassy way of yours. There’s never enough coffee, I reply, inhaling the needle-scent of permanent marker. I draw circles on my palm, hoping it will stop my feelings from leaping out of my mouth and into your ears. You smirk as you leave the room; I hope we have the same smoke break.
5.
Distorted garbage cans stand navy-purple in the flood lamps. The air smells of nearby ocean, vanilla scones, old spaghetti, plastic. You sit on the stoop, hair pulled back with a lettuce rubber band. I lean over the railing. Our exhalations become one ghost weighed down by rain, and soon the storm will knit until everything is wet and warm as earth.
Sam Moe is the recipient of a 2023 St. Joe community Foundation Poetry Fellowship from Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Whale Road Review, The Indianapolis Review, Sundog Lit, and others. Her poetry book Heart Weeds is out from Alien Buddha Press and her chapbook Grief Birds is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April ’23. Her full-length Cicatrizing the Daughters is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.
