• Bushra Rehman

    Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens but her mother says she was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure, but it would explain a few things.

Marianna’s Beauty Salon AVAILABLE NOW!

“In Marianna’s Beauty Salon, a daughter-witness records the lifelong trades and private tolls of immigration: promise passed down to children who sing the songs of the new land, learning the charm and violence of strange streets. These poems travel memory’s vast landscapes and never quite get over love’s ability to simultaneously wound and sustain us. … Rehman’s poems are about home—the ones we inherit, flee. The homes we lose and still carry, and the homes we become for each other.” — Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of Starshine & Clay and She Has a Name

PURCHASE YOUR COPY HERE

Writing

My Family and Earthquake Relief in Pakistan

ColorLines, Winter 2006 “…While watching my parents. . . in action, I relearned the most important lessons of activism: the strongest, most effective form of community activism is not complicated. It comes from a sense of family, love, urgency.” Earthquake (PDF)

Our Little Secrets: A Pakistani Artist Explores the Shame And Pride of Her Community’s Bathroom Practices

ColorLines, Summer 2005 “We were in the kitchen, my mother and I, when she turned to me and said, “Did you know Amreekans keep medicine in the bathroom?” I waited, not quite sure where she was going with this. She looked at me as if I was slow and then continued, “They keep it in […]

You Say You Miss My Hair

(For bald girls everywhere) Don’t you see that now the entire night and the light are my hair That the fences on delancey street the old columns the broken figures and statues that now these are my hair (your soft hands on my head are my hair) The broken english of a mother running across […]