Cast Iron

Everything goes
into this three-pound confessional:
oil fragrant with peanuts,
sometimes sesame, always garlic.
It can reincarnate last night’s rice
I cook down hard, until it’s evolved
into brown crunch infused
with jasmine and salt. My skillet
has gone to war, seared
steaks, downed men,
transformed flabby pork
belly into an armor of crispy
chicharrón to be dipped
in peppered vinegar or tabasco.
It has cradled so many uncarved
chickens whose caverns have housed
whole lemons sliced like cathedral
windows of sun, apple pears,
or onions like unmapped globes.
I bless the chicken
with soy sauce, coconut
vinegar and even a bit
of ginger that bites like a woman
at the peak of bliss.

This is how I get the men
to love me.

I watch them eat
in unarmed silence,
spellbound by potatoes
I’ve scalloped, then fried
in butter and shallots.
I’ve sautéed that cod
to a softness that renames
their tongues, as if eating
were a thousand
and one nights,
and they can’t move
and they wait for centuries
on their knees,
begging: Just a bit more.
Just a bit more.

Copyright © 2025 by Allison Albino. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 25, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This poem was in response to the question: what are the artifacts of your life? If someone were to do an archeological dig of your life, what would they discover that is representative of you? My cast iron has held so much, fed so many loved ones. It has endured and accompanied me and is capable of doing so beyond me. This poem is my ode to an everyday object which has lived alongside me—and that in itself is grand.”
—Allison Albino