It’s a Family Recipe

Andreea Ceplinschi

My mother loved me with food –

she never learned to caress, speak kindness, pray for me –

her cookbook was Bible. 

She summoned moussaka, Russian salad, and the Holy Archangel Michael 

over the stovetop, where she taught me about seasoned flesh, 

about warm exhale pushed up from bellies and simmering pots.

She drew me the blueprint for womanhood on blistered bell pepper skins, 

oven-seared forearms, mandolin-scalloped potatoes and fingertips,

she raised me kitchen-grown:

A daughter is to be bound by vein to the Formica tabletop altar, 

broken-in like salt-rubbed cabbage,

quieted down to the clicks in the stove coils, 

crumbed into cutting board splinter and grain.

A woman licks the wooden spoon out of cast iron that softens the onion 

until she makes no tears.