Dave Bonta begins with a line so plain it barely sounds like poetry: "I have three turnips." Nothing could be more ordinary, and the rest of the poem sets out to make that ordinariness strange. Over five short stanzas, three root vegetables turn from kitchen objects into castaways from another world, and the poem becomes a lesson in what close attention can do to something you thought you knew.
The first image is a surprising one. The turnips hold "sharpness gathered in softening rinds / like new wine in old wineskins." The phrase echoes the biblical saying about new wine bursting old wineskins, but here the picture is gentler. The old container is going soft, and the sharp, peppery life inside it is still intact. The sound supports the idea: "rinds," "like," "wine" and "wineskins" chime on the same long *i*, so the line seems to ferment as you read it. Then the poem swerves into comedy. The pink and white skins become "carousels / from a run-down amusement park," and the pale scribbles on them are "graffitoed by nematodes." Nature becomes a vandal, and the tiny worms that mark the turnips are cast as bored teenagers with spray cans. The joke is affectionate, but the picture of faded fairground cheer is also faintly melancholy.
In the third stanza the poet picks the turnips up, and the language gets physical. They "fit oddly in the palm," a clumsy, truthful phrase, and the details are blunt: "rats' tails & severed tops." The ampersand, used here and in "pink & white," gives the poem a jotted, notebook feel. The question that follows, "What planet are they from?", works as a hinge. Until now the turnips have been compared to earthly things. From here on they are foreign bodies, and the next stanza presses the idea. "Marooned" makes them castaways, and the poem lists what they lack. Potatoes have eyes that sprout, but these have "no eyes / to sprout grappling hooks," and so no means of clinging to the ground again. Having lost their leaves, they have "no way to win back the sun." The cutting of the tops, an everyday kitchen act, starts to look like an exile.
The last stanza opens with "But," so we expect a reprieve. The poet slices a turnip open and finds "starch-white deserts / unriffled by any wind." This confirms the planet idea instead of softening it, and the inside of the turnip is a landscape. The word "unriffled" is the poem's most inventive choice. A wind riffles sand, water or the pages of a book, so the word calls up dunes and ripples that aren't there. It suggests a stillness so complete that nothing has ever disturbed it. The sun the turnips can't win back in stanza four is matched by the wind they never feel. The poem also ends on a fragment with no verb, so it stops as abruptly as the knife stops at the bottom of the root.
The form is quiet and controlled. There are five unrhymed tercets, with short lines of mostly four to seven syllables and no fixed meter, so the rhythm follows speech. Two stanzas use colons, the first and the last, and they frame the poem like bookends. Each begins with a plain statement and then unfolds into a picture, first of wine and then of desert. Between them the questions and the list of what the turnips lack give the middle of the poem its drift toward loneliness.
The poem matters because it shows how attention works. It is funny, with its carousels and graffiti, but the humor leads somewhere more serious. By the end, a vegetable you would normally peel and boil has become a small, sealed world, and it is unsettling as well as lovely. The poem never says what to feel about that, and it doesn't need to. It lets the knife, and the odd word "unriffled," do the work.