Aug 03, 2021
Midcentury Modern
I find myself looking at the same memories with new eyes now that you’re gone.
I find myself looking at the same memories with new eyes now that you’re gone.
I could only acknowledge my thyroid condition from sly, sideways angles—a hobbit stealing from a sleeping dragon’s hoard.
Squirrels are violent maters. I thought about that as metaphor, but I’ve already written that kind of essay, that story.
And does asking these questions make me a good mother?
Not-great tattoos remind you that you are a constantly evolving human—that your definitions of beauty and happiness may change form.
We’ve spent quarantine in faulty mirrors, sparking negative feedback loops.
I made a promise, too, that I would bring her back to you.
My childhood rat tail was a lesson on the borders of class and gender.
There—the small red cut marks on the knuckles, which any bulimic could identify as those made by the teeth when finger-inducing vomiting.
Like Jazmine Sullivan’s “The Other Side,” a song from her latest EP, Heaux Tales, I saw a life outside the confines of conservatism—the length of my skirt and the policing of what I was allowed to say and do.
How the Bigfoot legend helped me reconcile unanswered questions about my adoption
My former therapist, a well-meaning white woman, once asked me, “Do you think he treated you badly because you are Asian?”
“Consumers in the Global South have a right to the best coffees from their nations, their sister nations, from wherever they want.”
Promiti Islam on queerness, Bengali-American identity, and the complexities of family acceptance,
Can you ever escape your complicity when you can't escape your own skin?
I don’t want to write today. I don’t want to write about violence today. I don’t want to write about honor or duty or respect today.
I wondered: Who was I when I first formed this friendship?
I didn’t want it to make sense—to send my children away for who knows how long—but I did need them to survive. I needed to survive.
The spirit of manifest destiny has been rebranded into the travelogue.
