Love after death
I often wonder about love after death. After the bodies are buried, janazas are done, and people become memories – how do we love souls then? Is it in the past, like a faded memory? Does loving end...
View ArticleThe Back Up Baby Daddy & My Geriatric Uterus
The little ghost pops up on my phone and I push the button to see what kind of a Snapchat he has sent. My sisters convinced me to download the app so we can send photos of outfits to each other, but...
View ArticleMaghrib Memories
Three years just doesn’t have the same ring to it as one month, or one year, or two. At three years, you are supposed to be better. You are supposed to be healed. You are supposed to forget. Three...
View ArticleThe Plight of the 30-Something Single
The phone rang, waking me from deep morning slumber. Naturally, I don’t pick up, though when I see the number my heart skips a beat. It’s my college roommate. She never calls me. In the past decade...
View ArticleUnmosqued
Poetry as dhikr. - Warsan Shire This past Ramadan I threw myself head over heels into poetry. I struggled this Ramadan, with my health, with my temper, with my solitude. But the one thing that kept me...
View ArticleThe Single Girl’s Survival Guide for Desi Weddings
It was exactly five years to the day since the wedding I wrote about in my story for the Love, Inshallah anthology, “Punk Drunk Love.” Here I was again for another Desi wedding in the same suburban...
View ArticleLove in Protest
As my car crested the hill, I could see the skyline of downtown Los Angeles on the horizon. I noticed the lights of a helicopter hovering close to Bunker Hill and another over Chinatown. I slowed down,...
View ArticleMy Absurdly Attractive Doctor & Other Misadventures in Love
I’ve never been one to get along with conventionally attractive people – probably a residual internal bias against the “popular” crowd in grade school that incessantly teased me for my Otherness. As an...
View ArticleA Mosque of One’s Own
It wasn’t the first time I had heard a woman give the azaan. In our Ramadan prayers in small activist circles with radical and queer Muslims, my friend Naaz would call us to prayer, her soft voice...
View ArticleIs my ex an FBI informant?
He was undoubtedly attractive – tall, lean and muscular, caramel colored skin, full lips, high cheekbones that framed his deeply intense hazel eyes. But his black leather jacket, felt fedora, acoustic...
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