I buy all the ingredients
and put them together,
use sharp instruments to destroy them
because they need to be destroyed,
chopped into chunks of matter
and fiber and juices that leak out
when the skins are pealed away
by fingernails and thumbs.

It’s not just onions that separate
into small domes like nesting dolls,
red lips and babushkas
tied under painted chins,
cubed potato and rutabaga and turnips,
slant cut celery and round carrots,
garlic pulverized under the flat of a blade,
and all the leaves plucked from
woody stems of garden thyme
and oregano and marjoram
slip between the needles from a rosemary bush,
a Laurel leaf rolled between my palms
until, like magic, they release my soul.

Just add heat and salt and wait
for something left over
from the wreck that I’ve made.