My mother couldn’t cook.<\/p>\n
Her cream of wheat was always lumpy.<\/p>\n
When I finally realized it was supposed to be smooth<\/p>\n
I had already grown to love the lumps.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Butter, not sugar, allowed to melt into a savory<\/p>\n
pool of yellow before stirring it in.<\/p>\n
Oven door opened to heat up the kitchen on winter mornings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In India, I eat upma<\/em> — semolina lumpy because it is supposed to be.<\/p>\n Spices that make my eyes hurt and<\/p>\n my nose run, eaten in<\/p>\n cafes that smell of coffee and cardamom and sweat. Eaten in<\/p>\n a place oven hot.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Americans ask me, “Don’t you think upma<\/em> is weird?”<\/p>\n Not at all, I say. Semolina should be sharp and not smooth, I tell them.<\/p>\n I wipe the sweat from my face.<\/p>\n My mom made it like this, I say.<\/p>\n It’s a cream of wheat lie that is white and lumpy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My mother couldn’t cook. Her cream of wheat was always lumpy. When I finally realized it was supposed to be smooth I had already grown to love the lumps. Butter, not sugar, allowed to melt into a savory pool of yellow before stirring it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-half-marathon-poem","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113536"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124759,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113536\/revisions\/124759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}