Receipts From Aol Instant Messenger (6); and Receipts From Aol Instant Messenger (11)
- Receipts From Aol Instant Messenger (6); and Receipts From Aol Instant Messenger (11)
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 ~*~ [End Page 55]
RECEIPTS FROM AOL INSTANT MESSENGER (11)
CANDYDANDY24
Enter new Away message:
~* BuStEd1 BiTcHeS bEtTeR fALL bAcK !! *~
Special characters:
% n = Screen Name of Buddy
% d = Current Date
% t = Current Time [End Page 56]
Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer living in Philadelphia. She is a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry, and she earned her MFA from Virginia Tech. Anuradha has received awards from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Frost Place, the Indiana University Writers' Conference, the Eckerd College Writers' Conference, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, diode poetry journal, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Shenandoah, Salt Hill, Hayden's Ferry Review, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, Bayou Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Slice Magazine, Zone 3, The Normal School, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Anuradha can be found at www.anuradhabhowmik.com.
Footnotes
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.
Footnotes
1. busted (adj.):
Built into my genetic code was the compulsion to deny & dismiss. I applied this blueprint to my
Understanding of love. I was bred as my bloodline's contaminant rather than its daughter. The middle
School bitches tallied body counts for every boy they loved. Too prude to be accounted for, I located love's
Terms & conditions at home, inside fists without closure. The permutations of my apologies were limitless. I learned to
Equate emotional disconnection with power—I tamed my temper to placate Ma's rage & later on, the hands &
Demands of the men I'd tally. Perhaps it was embedded in my blood to love & be loved with inadequacy.
