Bulbs
A love letter to garlic
22nd October 2022
Today’s TinyLetter is an excerpt from a piece I wrote almost a year ago. It’s part of an exercise we did during the creative writing course I took last year with the brilliant Charlotte Heather. During the course we touched a few different topics and spoke about various writing genres, including poetry. Although I am perfectly aware that I am far from being a poet, I remember having fun putting these lines together; I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
Bulbs
I can see you from here
you’re almost hiding
lying quietly next to your cousins
they are bigger and take most of the space
wearing their golden and crunchy jackets
you look quite plain
compared to the flashy lemons
electric, inebriating, jolly.
Little did they know
you’re not plain at all
quite the opposite, in fact
pungent, stubborn, tenacious.
Some of your cloves are shooting
you’re jauntily sprouting
I can see a bunch of bright green tufts
peeking from the edge of the ceramic bowl
getting taller and taller like mini aerials
you look rather needy
a reminder I should pick you up
crush you, peel you, fry you.
If you'd like to support a wonderful writer, you should read Charlotte’s most recent work, the poetry pamphlet “I, Fig Wasp”. You can get it from Bottlecap Press (physical or a digital copy) or by sending an email to theremotebody@gmail.com, if you’re based in the U.K.
I used the adjective electric to describe lemons as a nod to a piece by Rachel Roddy in which she writes about the electric charges of these wonderful fruits and gives the recipe for spaghetti with lemon, parmesan and cream. I highly recommend reading it and then rush to the kitchen to prepare that pasta.