Shayna Blank




your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden
— Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Onion”

Should I be embarrassed?
I knew how to cut an onion
before I learned to read:

unfurled stem to root from
its paper armor, sliced across
seams of abundant, pungent flesh.

Maybe this moment is just
a fissure in the illusion of my own
competency, like reading Neruda

and thinking that means I
understand the complete
sacrifice of love

or that because I’ve gone
to the sea every year of my life
that I might one day form scales.

The blade itself gleams with
my blood, thin and prismatic
as if coated with a slick of oil.

Whatever I am
on the inside
eventually makes its way out.





Shayna Blank is an award-winning writer, web designer, and editor from Baltimore, Maryland. You can read her work in the Loch Raven Review and the Susquehanna Review.