Uma Menon is a writer from Winter Park, Florida. She is the author of Hands for Language (Mawenzi House, 2020) and My Mother’s Tongues (Candlewick Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Progressive, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications. Menon was the 2019–2020 Youth Fellow for the International Human Rights Art Festival and a 2020–2021 Encore Public Voices Fellow.
More By This Poet
We Play Charades
My first instinct is to translate
the word. Make it easier to understand
without saying the word itself.
I feel guilt for this mistake—
for changing languages instead
of describing. Isn’t this an easy way out?
My mother and I are playing charades
alone. We make this...