Letters to the "here and now"

A Letter to Mommy Earth

Dearest,

I’ve fallen straight d

                                o

                                    w

                                        n   in LOVE with you, Mommy.

The way that you           and
                              twist            turn, orbiting around the flames of the sun. 

Hot damn, you showed me life was in DANCING – no matter what may come.

You showed me how to thunder, crackle, break, and pour in the most succulent of ways.
You taught me that the Earth don’t shatter in a matter of days.
Life keeps going on, and you keep trying.
No matter what, you strive to grow even as you are slowly dying.

Mommy knows what she’s doing, even if no one else does.
Mommy lives and breathes romance in the way that her dew drops catch on spiderwebs.
Mommy exudes sensuality in the way her breath caresses your body and tickles it.
She’s a hard lover, a tough one.

She doesn’t scare easily from the trauma that you’re carrying.
Each rustle of leaves, each crashing of waves is her saying:

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Listen to the music I make.
It’s a symphony of love,
An echoing of my heart
A beating of life, untethered.
I want you to be free, my love.
Be free and be whatever you’re feeling.
Change as much as you want.
We all have seasons.

How could you not fall in love with the sight of her heavy clouds, pregnant with rain?
Does the way her skies dress up at dawn not ease a bit of your pain?
I’ve fallen d

                o

                w

                n                      

                DEEP 

                below her crust.

                                                                                   up.

                                                                         back

                                                             climb

                                                 wanna

I’ve fallen for her, and I don’t 
No, she, the Earth, surrounds me.
She holds me close to her without even knowing what’s she’s doing. 
She cares for me without caring if I’m conscious of it.
She let’s me take, take, take so much from her, not asking anything in return.
But that just makes me want to give, give, give back to her even more.
And one of the ways that I’m doing so is with this declaration of my ever-burning affection, my utter tenderness when it comes to her enigmatic definition.

Do you hear that, Mommy?

Do you hear my cries?
Can’t you see I’m head

                             over

                             heels for ya and I’m not gonna give up in this lifetime?

Sincerely and forever yours,

M.

Bridges

I read something recently about letters being bridges. 

I’ve been thinking about bridges a lot, actually. The metaphors there are probably obvious (divided world, globalised technology), but I haven’t always thought about what it means to cross sides. Or rather, have no sides. And how. 

Let’s say then that a letter is both the bridge and the crossing. It’s something you build up as you write, and lay down as you send. But I’m not sending this to anyone in particular, so maybe it’s a bridge to nowhere? One person’s bridge is another’s wasted words. One person’s wasted words is another’s intentions. 

Anyway enough wasted time. I’m writing today because I miss us. Black Panthers, Yellow Peril, Red Power. Sexy names! Rage. Action. Burning things for each other. Black-and-white photos of screaming. Ephemeral protest. Clashes in the streets. Slipping back into the night. Visual legacies now in museums, once on wanted signs. 

I don’t even know how to confront anymore. If I ever even did. I feel like I got so focused on survival that survival became my only focus. I go to protests and stuff (I promise!) and try to organize in my community and do the work, but it feels like it's own bridge to nowhere most days. The hopelessness weighs heavy. We're watching our own imminent disappearance, and I feel stuck because shouting across a bridge-less river isn't enough and honestly I'm kind of scared to do more. Or, as I said, I don't know how. Tell me, at what point does it become unbearable and unignorable? At what point do we come back together? At what point do I pick up a rock? Should I just start a commune? But also I'm a settler here? And also I have no money and I don't know how to build a house? See! I need guidance! 

What’s funny is, the world now doesn’t actually seem much better than the one you were in. You would probably say it is, but I think it's just different and more insidious. We gained enough progress that it enabled our backslide. It also enabled our division. Solidarity marches one day, nitpicking oppression ladders the next. I’m sure you did that too, I just wasn’t there so I’m pretending it’s our fancy new thing. 

I guess I’m writing to ask how to muster. Myself and others. I guess I’m writing because I made up a story of you in my head and listened to enough talks to imagine a fiction of togetherness. Maybe we were never together. Maybe there's space for combat and space for love and some people choose one and some people can do both. Me? Lover. Letter-writer. Ruminator. 

Maybe you don’t have answers. Maybe my bridge to nowhere, my wasted words, is only intention after all. An intention for another future. A letter I’ll receive in 80 years. 

But maybe you have tips? Hit me back as soon as is convenient

- by Anonymous Contributor 

Jugaar

When my Nani arrived in Houston in the early 1970s, she couldn’t find dhania, or cilantro, a cornerstone of many desi dishes. She tried asking for Chinese parsley, often in vain. Sooji for halwa was unavailable, so she improvised with Quaker Oats wheat flour. Egg roll wrappers became samosa par, ricotta cheese worked for ras malai, and saffron was a rare, expensive treasure.

This was jugaar: making do. Incidentally, it was one of my Nana’s favorite Urdu words. For a minority in an unfamiliar land, it was an essential practice for his survival, rooted in resilience and resourcefulness. It was also communal. Without a jamatkhana in those early years, my grandparents hosted group prayers in their living room, nurturing community and piecing together a semblance of home.

Today, those ingredients are easier to find, and cultural and religious spaces are more established. Pockets of color emerge more frequently within spaces of whiteness, and jugaar takes on a new form: sustaining and nurturing these pockets, ensuring their vibrancy and fostering growth. This spirit was alive at the latest Jugaar Popup, Another Food Story with Jyoti, held at Brique par Brique.

The evening was a celebration of Jyoti’s roots in Haryana. Her sarson ka saag and bajre ki roti, rich with ghee and unapologetically South Asian, told her story while embracing the diasporic ethos of sharing and adapting. The setting, Brique par Brique, with its warm, lived-in furniture, carrom board, and mingling aromas of chai and agarbatti, felt like home. Languages flowed—Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and English—while Jon Raja’s vinyl collection, spanning Hindustani classics to hip-hop, embodied the jugaar ethos of making do, reflecting the diasporic reality of navigating, merging, and celebrating the intersections of multiple cultures.

These gatherings transform food, music, and art into empathy machines. At Brique par Brique, culture is celebrated as fluid, evolving, and richly textured. Alongside Jyoti’s food and Jon’s music, textiles by Pramila adorned the space, their patchwork mirroring the event’s diversity: people of different ages, colors, and backgrounds interwoven into a vibrant whole.

This ethos moves beyond the evening. Brique par Brique collaborates with organizations like Welcome Haven, whose workshops with asylum-seeking families build networks of mutual care. Such initiatives foster community in unfamiliar places, reminding us again that belonging is a communal act.

In the background, a video of Jyoti cooking in her kitchen looped, while at the front, she shared her heritage boldly, undiluted for the white palate. In Quebec, where immigration debates are fraught with nationalist rhetoric, gatherings like these resist the flattening tendencies of multiculturalism, encouraging immigrant cultures to thrive as they are—vivid and complex. It is an act of quiet resilience, lighting up spaces too often cast in monotone. As a diasporic, it’s difficult not to romanticize moments like these. But why not? They remind us that culture, at its core, is not only about preservation but constant reinvention. It’s an act of love stitched together in every meal, every song, every story.

- by Mikal Nazarani

what lies behind madness

Love is madness in a world upside down and inside out. 

Sometime last winter, on a night walk back from the mosque, I felt the sudden urge to write about madness. I wrote about crazy women, their right to exist, to be seen, to be human, and to be loved by God. I felt the urge to scream that madness is a way to exist and resist in a world that subjects us to unspeakable truths.

Sonya Massey was killed by the police, a constellation of grief appears around me, and I become one with the living and the dead. She called for help in a world unwilling to simultaneously hold her Black womanhood, her madness, and her humanity. Her last words were “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus” and “I am sorry” and I want to set this whole entire world on fire.

I wanted to write about mad women because the mad men I love have died, and although I grew up with them, I never had the chance to be at their burial or visit their grave. 

Everything is upside down, and no one can tell me why their lives made no sense. There is a denial of madness except when the madness serves the purpose of explaining itself. He is mad because he is. Mad people are mad because they are. Madness is thrown outside of the world into an ontologized fantasy. Fantasies hide the truths we cannot bare about the world, this world that is unable to hold our humanity.

But I know a fantasy when I see one, or at least I spend my days trying to carve reality out of the fantasies that make this world stand on its feet. I know why he was mad, incarcerated, held in psychiatric wards, and is now dead, way too young. He too was Black and mad in a world that could not hold him. He is dead and I will never see him alive again. Except maybe in heaven. 

Heaven is the place where I send my hopelessness to patiently wait for me.

I know the unspeakable truths that no one wants to speak of, and I want to write them on every wall of every house of this whole entire world. They lurk in the shadows of my consciousness during the day, insistingly waiting for me to hear what they have to say. 

Both lucky and forced to be alive, I hold these truths, too heavy to be carried alone, and the horizon of death feels like the most heavenly of blessings. Heaven is the place that holds the grief I cannot bear.

Unspeakable truths are replaced by the fantasies we speak of. Self-explanatory, like a magic spell, madness stands on its feet without the world and outside of it. Outside of the world, it becomes the fantasy where we send unspeakable truths patiently waiting for us to find the strength to speak them. crazy people are crazy. and like magic, the world is no longer a snake devouring its own tale. it is no longer a cycle of self-destruction. it is no longer built on impossible contradictions. it just is.

Madness is the ontologized fantasy that makes possible the negation of the world as it stands. Madness is a fetish that makes possible the negation of the world as it is. upside down and inside out.

- by Nabiha Yahiaoui