I cannot make my mooncake in your muffin tin. My skin tone isn’t the right shade of citizen here. I have done all I can, My soap swapped for bleach, My name changed to assimilate with my oppressors, My speech fluent in a language my parents don’t understand. I long to swap my cheongsam for…

in my dream i greet everyone with apologies. my breath trails into sighs. my gaze averts downwards. my body apologises for the space it takes up. i’m sorry. i’m sorry. i’m alive. i’m sorry. in my dream i watch from third person. i wear a top that screams whore. i apologise to my body for…

“Hi guysssss, welcome to my channel!” This phrase echoes through the infinite void of YouTube, penetrating our souls with its obnoxious Valley girl intonation, and has become synonymous with the cult of social media influencers that promote the culture of beauty blogging. The incredulous rise of beauty blogging in the last 10 years, which started…

Something I’m yet to do has consumed the last few years of my life, surrounding me like a bad stench I just can’t seem to shake. One wretched little word. The negative connotation far worse than the definition. Virgin. Most people don’t believe me, assuming I’ve done the deed. It almost feels like I’m letting…

The thought of getting a tattoo has nagged at me for a while, like when the hemming of a shirt comes undone and no matter how many times I snip it off, I can’t stop tugging at it and a new hem straggles free. Recently, a lot of symbols have told me to let it…

At age 20, I was lying in bed the morning after my first date with a man I’d been enamoured by for months when his hand slid into my underwear. “So, what do you like?” he said as he looked at me. I stared at him for a few moments. My mind was blank. “Um……

It is a motorcycle alongside me Frozen in place An unwelcome, foreign hand It is laughter ringing in my ears A moment insignificant to a coward Sexual assault is the statement unsaid lingering in a small room with one police officer It is an apology from the man who didn’t commit the act and a…

Content warning: early pregnancy loss, miscarriage “All day, all night, the body intervenes…” In her essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf implores readers to develop a language in order to explore the experience of inhabiting a human body. No stranger to the myriad of ways the body can falter, Woolf considered this process integral to…

Throughout my life, I have had five different family names. At first, this was because while I was growing up, my mother had several different husbands and each time she remarried, her name changed. She wanted her four children to have the same name she had. I was born in Belleville, Illinois, as Diana Kay…

Growing up with a “mild” disability, I always struggled to find the place that I belong. I felt that some of the goals that I could see my friends achieving were impossible for me. At the same time, I always heard how I “didn’t look disabled”, so felt that identity didn’t fit for me either.…

The generations of gossip in my family have never known the word “boundaries”, despite the conservative roots from which my most salacious genes stem. Case in point: my grandmother knows that I have Herpes. She knows how I got it, who I got it from, how old I was when I got it, and, due…

I sip at the patriarchy with my morning cup of tea, lapping persistently at the periphery of consciousness I forget that tea burns and I burn my tongue, taste buds scorched and trust gone too I blow on it hoping it will cool down, hoping it will get better steam unfurls into oblivion Water changes…