Places onions take you

i.They are at the open air market among the sleek maroon eggplants, the produce vendors' massive arms stamped with blue tatoos, pyramids of oranges blazing like jazz in the noonday sun, carts of oysters spilling ice shavings by runaway plums, and rows of lemons facing one way like schools of fish certain to turn and flute the air with yellow fins. ii. The onions lie tumbled, shimmering, onionskins slips of white birch paper ragged in wind, rising at the touch of a finger or the breeze of a passerby; cousins of gypsum rock whose translucent layers powder into white sand dunes, drawn with evening shadows, flowers of the sand verbena watched by a single star. iii. At night the onions have ears. They hear the water trickling through furrows of warm mud in mirrored fields, the jingle of heated crickets in darkness. They remember the cars passing, the people not speaking, letting their hair blow, hanging their arms out the windows. They breathe again with cool root and leaf the summer air.