If food is poetry is not poetry also food?
— Joyce Carol Oates

Karen Rigby is the author of the poetry books Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024). A National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, her poems are published in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, and The London Magazine. She is a freelance book reviewer in Arizona.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Karen, what poems have you brought for us today?

Song for the Onion


Let me love the onion worn
by the thumb's touch—
sulfur and sugar a scent Egyptians believed
could ferry the dead home
from their sleep.

Let me flay the double-heart
that stings or melts
to caramel depending on time, temperature, weather.
Let me taste the pure, explosive signature.
Let the lioness outshine her sisters,
the shallot and the leek.

Let the field bury crystalline skins.
Let the roots drive the green hands skyward
in spite of the earth.
Let me remember the primitive,
underground birth, and the kingdom
of sleepers. Let me consider

the lily’s doppelgänger.
Let the onion telescope
multiple selves. Let me admire
her reckless theatre.
Let nothing else weep on behalf of the blade.
Let me praise the onion’s sacrifice:
a trapezist blooming in release.
-----

To the Huy Fong Foods Company


Thank you for the plastic rocket on every table
in North America, chili like rattlesnakes or maracas—
sriracha!—and the dollop of orange
in spicy mayonnaise. For the iconic rooster
to wake my suburban empire of eggs.
Send my regards to Tapatío
and every glass siren at Fry’s.
I hear Kettle made sriracha chips,
as did Lay’s, and what I need, like a fine haze
of powder, is pain equal to the pain.
On the Scoville scale your sauce rates lower
than scotch bonnets, but good enough
for my Chinese/Latina/Western Pennsylvanian genes.

Last week a Channel 4 English drama
carved verandas in the Himalayan foothills.
Let’s talk about colonization for three seconds:
architecture as civilized violence.
Or the sting of my ancestor’s rage
when he left a snowbound village
for a serpent republic. A peeling balustrade
says nothing of the century’s arguments.
Dear Mr. Tran: what’s the recipe for global happiness?
Green-tipped bottles ship out of east Los Angeles.
A river of mercury stains my plate.
-----

Plums

Friars. Red beauties. Elephant hearts
you could pare on your tongue, limbs darkening
below the line. Between each load
of shirts pinned sleeve to sleeve
you’d raise the basket,
bend among the trees.
Some of the plums tightened
like a baby’s fist. You pricked their skins,
packed buckets with sugar and lemon.
Six trays dried on the long bench.
All evening fireflies
haunted you with syncopations,
and when you came to the Santa Rosas,
the fruit of the spirit was patient as knives
sharpened with pumice. Forget what you know.
What should he bring to your hunger
if not his own wrist?

You're listening to the poems of Karen Rigby on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.