~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Uma Menon

At Sixteen, I Swore I Would Never Cook

At twenty-one, I roast slivers of tofu & fry onions

bathed in batter. Anxious, in wait of my folks’

reactions. They never tell me they hate it, but I can

tell when leftovers linger in the fridge for days

till they scent of plastic. Ungrateful I was as a child,

feasted on my grandmother’s snake gourd thoran &

my mother’s paper-thin dosas. I would never be

like them, fingertips under knife blades, flipping roti,

bare, no spatula. I would never pine for thankless

labor, pain over fleeting platefuls. Different now,

far away, tongue numbed of taste. Pantry full of spices

& flours of undefined shelf lives. Cumin I pinch

& eat raw. Little else I can birth in an afternoon,

so I stir & sear & sauté. I text my mother to ask

what to do when lentils taste soapy & she says

I should have rinsed them longer. I am not used to this

kind of disappointment: paneer a tad overdone,

rubbery on the skin, cannot be undone. I pretend

it is perfect. I feast. I would never buckle.

Uma Menon is a writer from Winter Park, Florida. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Progressive, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications. She is the author of My Mother’s Tongues (Candlewick Press, 2024) and Our Mothers’ Names (Candlewick Press, 2025). Read more at theumamenon.com.