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

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

Jesse McCartney Live in Atlantic City, 2017

Dear Jesse / after you performed at the club at Harrah’s / I made it onto your Instagram / in the photograph I stand front row / with severe inebriation / the herd of white girls behind me smiles widely / with arms out to you / the blonde beside me sings into the mic that you’ve held out to her / and I don’t notice her / or you / instead I stare at my phone / unfazed / my face in its resting bitch state

Dear Jesse / in the early 2000s your teen idol status was cemented / and I worshipped you / along with all the white girls in middle school / the white girls told me I was too Indian / the white girls told me to shrink my thighs and buy Limited Too jeans / to measure up to them

Dear Jesse / back then I wanted to trade lives with the white girls / I wanted to learn / how to drown out Ma / her Bengali invective / her brute force that left my bedroom lock broken / Dear Jesse / I’d press play on the CD player / push my back against the door / put the volume on max / and listen to the tracks on Beautiful Soul / the album with your black and white photograph / I’d imagine my life if I was pretty enough for you / for anyone / if I was happy

Dear Jesse / I took blows trying to keep your posters on my bedroom walls / beside glow-in-the-dark stars

Dear Jesse / I’m 24 now and you’ve hit 30 / after you sang we took a selfie / I looked good wearing false lashes for the first time / and your foundation didn’t match your neck / Dear Jesse / back in the day / you were blonde-haired green-eyed and hot as hell / but you faded away with the other heartthrobs in your wave

Dear Jesse / I once thought a white boy was the best a girl could get / but dating them has only taught me regret / now I curve white men like it’s my occupation

Dear Jesse / I’m blessed to have grown up ugly / I’m aging gracefully / while you and your carbon copy white girls / lose collagen day by day / I once considered white women my competition / I was so rehearsed in Eurocentric / Jesse / they can have you

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.