Goddfrey Hammit.

My mother was chopping onions,
and I said,
“Put a matchstick between your teeth:
that’s what I’ve heard.”
 
“Lit?” she asked.
 
What do you think?
But, actually, I didn’t know:
all I had heard was, “When chopping onions,
place a matchstick between your teeth.”
 
What good was my advice if I couldn’t say
whether lit or unlit, or whether you struck it
only to blow it out, letting the smoke
claw at your eyes first, before the onion could?
 
Did you bite the wood bit, or did you crack
the head between your teeth like a pink peppercorn,
a spark shooting onto your tongue,
the smell of sulfur in your throat?
Did you hold it sideways like a rose stem in a lover’s mouth?
 
Maybe you did light it, and you looked down
to see the onion through fire.
You chopped fast,
 
because if you thought
an onion could make you cry,
 
well, a lit match between your teeth,
scorched lips,
eyelashes singed:
that would give you something to cry about.

“Onion-eyed” first appeared in Rat’s Ass Review