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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Brown Girl Chromatography by Anuradha Bhowmik

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This selection, chosen by guest editor Tierney Bailey, is from Brown Girl Chromatography by Anuradha Bhowmik, released by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2022.

Receipts from AOL Instant Messenger [6]

BUDDY INFO: CANDYDANDY24
Personal Profile:

i * l o v e * my * b i t c h e s.

|| bffaeae1 || u know who u r ~*~

1 bffaeae (n.):

By the time I adopted cunt into my everyday vocabulary, the white girls of South Jersey had 
	already prepared me
For life with bitches. My reflexes were drawn from their vernacular—I’m not fucking scared 
	of you
Flew from my mouth if a two-faced bitch had my name in hers. My friends & my enemies & I
Addressed each other as bitch or ho or slut or pussy in some variation & we held onto these 
	aliases. Lesbo was an
Epithet in the adolescent dialect—the white girls made it my nickname, and I stopped 
	wearing sports jerseys.
At 25, I collect boys’ fleeces & button-down shirts from Polo Ralph Lauren. I dress like a frat 
	boy bitch, doused in
Ed Hardy perfume, with my lipstick swiped on bold & bright to keep me in my place.

Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer from South Jersey. She is the 2021 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first collection Brown Girl Chromatography (Pitt Poetry Series, 2022). Bhowmik is a Kundiman Fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry. She lives in Philadelphia.

Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and is a dice-collecting gremlin. Currently, Tierney is Associate Poetry Editor with Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, Associate Editor with PodCastle, and a freelance graphic designer. She has earned a BA from the University of Indianapolis and a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College.

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