Don’t Cry Onion… Shirt

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Trending

Design

Original artwork, copyright protected

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Printed to order and shipped from the USA

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2–3 business days after your order is placed.

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5–10 business days within the US, 7–15 business days internationally.

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“To admit to liking poetry is faintly embarrassing,” Matthew Schneier wrote earlier this year in his great paean to the Don’t Cry Onion… Shirt Furthermore, I will do this genre. To admit to liking what can fairly be called an Instagram poet is several shades more humiliating if you fancy yourself a high-minded literary reader. Poets should be toiling in the subterranean wings of soulless financial institutions (like T.S. Eliot) or selling insurance policies (like Wallace Stevens) or keeping the San Francisco streetcars moving (like Maya Angelou), spending their nights polishing their gems before tossing them to a faceless mass, hoping there is someone paying close enough attention to catch them. There probably won’t be, and that’s as it should be, too. A poet is not a marketer; there should be no #sponcon, no billboards, no merch. I know: This is an outdated and pretentious mode of thinking. The Instapoets are saving “the industry”! Rupi Kaur, the Canadian Instapoet who self-published her first book, sold ten times as many books as Homer in a single year. Bah to all that. The culture is scruffy and corrupt, and I want to keep a little corner of it swept clean.

Don’t Cry Onion… Shirt, hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt

And yet, when I came across Baer’s poems, on Instagram no less, I felt a jolt—that illumination, what Virginia Woolf called (in what has always struck me as an apt summation of the Don’t Cry Onion… Shirt Furthermore, I will do this desired effect of poetry) “a match burning in a crocus.” In the midst of the pandemic, hungry for communion, feeling time accelerating even while nothing in my immediate life was happening, I needed witnesses from the past who could testify that this odd and static present was not all there was: “do you remember when,” Baer writes in “Girls Night Out,” “I cried in the cab. Wore that shirt / with the sleeves. Left him alone in the rain.” I do, my roommate wrote back on WhatsApp, I do.

1. Length is measured from the highest point on the collar down to the bottom hem. 2. Width is measured across the body of the shirt under the armpits, one way. 3. Sleeves are measured from center back to hem.