2021 Mixtape: Writers of Colour Audio Anthology

White, black, and light pink text on a blue background. Image of a Black woman with curly hair wearing headphones (face not visible). Text: 2021 Mixtape: Writers of Colour Audio Anthology. Curated by Hannah Lavery. Sound design by Sarya Wu.

We are thrilled to present ‘Mixtape 2021: Writers of Colour Audio Anthology’, to celebrate the work produced within the Writers of Colour Writing Group during 2021, led by Hannah Lavery.

For the anthology, attendees were invited to submit up to two poems or short prose pieces which were started in group sessions. Contributors then had group mentoring sessions with Hannah before submitting an audio recording of their final poem. Lastly, each poem was given a soundscape, created by sound designer and musical poet, Sarya Wu.

You can listen to the album on Soundcloud here or scroll down to listen and access each audio and text. You can also download a PDF of all poems hereThe text of each poem is provided for access purposes only. Authors retain full copyright.

 

2021 Mixtape: Writers of Colour Audio Anthology 

Listen to the anthology on SoundCloud

Download the PDF with text and audio links

Featuring:

  • Amanda Ajomale
  • Andrea Cabrera Luna
  • Andrés N. Ordorica
  • Clementine E. Burnley
  • David Creighton-Offord
  • Hannah Lavery
  • Jeda Pearl
  • Jess Brough
  • Kamala Santos
  • Karl Nkanyiso Sibanda
  • Leela Soma
  • Lisa Williams
  • Loraine Masiya Mponela
  • Lyly Lepinay
  • Myla Corvidae
  • Nasim Rebecca Asl
  • Niall Moorjani 
  • Nichelle Santagata
  • Nikki Kilburn
  • Raman Mundair
  • Roshni Gallagher
  • Sanjna Yechareddy
  • Sean Wai Keung
  • Shasta Hanif Ali
  • Sophie Lau

Selected by Hannah Lavery | Twitter | Website
Sound Design by Sarya Wu | Instagram | Soundcloud | Website

Amanda Ajomale

Art on a Canvas

Your lines and dots mark stories across my skin

From beginning to end

An ongoing expression of my soul’s darkest secrets

A message in a bottle

In an undulating river

Shooting stars across the night’s sky

Leaving hidden gems above the heads of each passer-by.

I was led, once, to believe you were the marks of a criminal

An outcast of society.

But each time your needle breaks the surface,

I feel another part of me set free.

I think it’s the pain I love the most,

The pain that makes you permanent

In your ink I tell my stories

It’s where I hold my venom and

Out from my head, my heart, my mind

I draw my greatest wishes and desires to place on my

Body as a forever reminder

That I felt something once.

Something magical, a miracle

That I am still alive

Satiracle, a pinnacle 

Of what I have inside.

So here you are, matched with my piercings

To show the world what I cannot say

I’m an addict, I must admit, and very soon I may

Cover my whole body in black lines and dots

For what I cannot put into words.

I thank you for providing art on a canvas

And allowing wounds to be transferred

From the very depths of my soul.

I still don’t feel whole

So I must thank the empty spaces, too

For allowing room for you to grow.

And what stories will you tell the world when my soul is no longer here?

“Here lies the canvas of a woman whose art told her to persevere.”

Andrea Cabrera Luna

I Can Break At Any Time/Yo Me Puedo Partir En Cualquier Momento

 

 YO ME PUEDO PARTIR EN CUALQUIER MOMENTO

 

 

Soy una oblea redonda y delgada

Sin mucho gusto

 

Vivo la vida como fantasma

Sin reír sin llorar sin hablar con nadie

 

No tengo hijos

Las mujeres oblea no tenemos hijos

 

Las mujeres oblea somos así

 

Yo me puedo quebrar en cualquier momento

Pero no lo hago

 

Porque quiero que la lluvia me ame 

Y me entiendan las rosas

 

Yo no tengo el aroma de su corazón

No tengo su color

 

Carezco de cualquier gracia

Carezco de cualquier desgracia

 

Soy una oblea sin la energía para ser sabrosa

 

No me gusta tener que explicarles a todos por qué

 

Soy una oblea con márgenes definidos

Mi territorio es limitado y mi vida circular 

 

Navega sin palabras de espacio

Ni conceptos temporales lineales

 

Viceversa es una palabra que me apasiona

Porque no la entiendo 

 

La mía es una casa pequeña 

sin reflejos en las ventanas

sin ventanas en los reflejos 

 

I CAN BREAK AT ANY TIME

 

 

I’m a thin round wafer

Without much taste

 

I live life as a ghost

Without laughing 

without crying 

without talking to anyone

 

I have no children

Wafer women have no children

 

That’s how wafer women are 

 

I can break at any time

But I don’t

 

Drops dampen me

I’m not a rose 

 

I don’t have the scent of their heart

I don’t have their colour

 

I lack any grace

I lack any disgrace

 

I’m a wafer with no desire to be tasty

 

I don’t like having to explain why

 

I’m a wafer with well-defined margins

My territory is limited,

And my life circular

 

I navigate without words of space

Nor linear temporal concepts

 

Vice versa is a word  

I am passionate about

Because I don’t understand it

 

Mine is a small house

With no reflections in the windows

And no windows in the reflections

 

 

 

Andrés N. Ordorica

Today

I have come here today

to channel a brewing unease inside me

 

I have come here today

to sprawl under sun in grass like a snail

 

I have come here today

to dance in the warm rain, unafraid of wet

 

I have come here today

to be both mountain and gorse

 

Here with you, I feel peace washing over me

like amber ochre leaves crunching underfoot

or raindrops emitting spectral rays of light

or a crisp apple bite reminding me, I am alive  

 

I have come here today to be with you

and this is what you’ve gifted me

Clementine E. Burnley

Searching the Archives

On the map, daughter countries share
a native tongue, a mother’s gift
Time is a hungry gun
Language a broken promise
History, a looted house
where the gate hangs loose
And apples rot underneath crowded trees
Gift in German,
means contagion

I meet Mbuya Nehanda’s severed head,
Nehanda says she
is not the last of her line
She has been Mbuya Nehanda for over five hundred years

You have to take your hat off to Elizabeth
Mbuya Nehanda says
In which tribe does the same blood sit 22 generations on the same throne?
William’blood-strong

My voice shades high
I shake my head to tea
Look at this fucking photo again
I search the archive
I don’t recognise this past

There-there, croon the Queens
They’re bones
I search the archive
Fünfundzwanzig is twenty five lashes
We too, beat our children

The rod is made of hippopotamus skin
I speak a world language
Kolonie and Heimat
I search the archive
For those spared the Prügelstrafe

David Creighton-Offord

In This Short Life That Only Lasts an Hour

3600 seconds.

Every second a hundred fragmented thoughts.
A flickering barrage of images.
A snowstorm of sparks
Each fighting for dominance

60 minutes.

Every minute carved into a complex, a conceit, a concept.
A raging internal debate.
A screaming discourse on the absolute.
A bitter dispute with cruel fate.

An hour.

Is nothing until it is a lifetime
Is a million battling iterations
Of a spark that became a thought
That became a concept
That was a picture
That shifts… like sand
Details falling away and changing
To become a memory
That is forgotten
In less than a second
In this short life that only lasts an hour

Hannah Lavery

Leaves Fall Gold

for Beldina Odenyo

There is something divine in endings
when God comes to sit with you

leaves fall, gold on the ground.

The day the call came, She is gone
I lay on my bedroom floor

like a felled tree staring up
at the irreplaceable.

Should we cry it out to the sky?
Where should we take it- this pain?

I stared
at the empty sky

where did she go?

until it dropped low enough
to meet me, in the December sun.

And as this year closed
a bullfinch came

to sit, beautiful orange
in the bare winter branch.

I lit another candle

to light up flat memory

but the sun cut

in, leaving my ritual
redundant. There is nothing

more sacred, than the new day.
It’s how I move forward

now that she has become
Everything.

The sky is so beautiful
today, I hear her laughter

in it. I hear it all the time.
I hear her in every line.

Jeda Pearl

When All That’s Left Is…

What is left, when the world is stripped bare,

innards scooped out, siphoned, bled dry?

What is left, when they are torn from you,

by acidic hate, or gulfs of salted water, 

cratered cities, abandoned shafts of fear?

When all that’s left is a silent howl

to reunite with your departed, 

call up the impossible

dream.

What is left is to find a way to love

this earth and her bodies like our own flesh 

tend and soothe, caress them, scrape back to wild – 

have a place to land our own selves

relearn to traverse this shifting ground.

Massage it into life

because all that’s left is love,

though I stand here – alive – asking

what has it cost the earth and her bodies?

Jess Brough

Long Distance

Sit with me

So that I can smell

The dust from where you’ve been.

No one has to tell me

That a journey is in the scent of a place,

And I am happy

That you now know these changing flavours.

I just wish I could have been there

To know them too.

 

You have returned

in different clothes,

And I have unravelled – 

weeks of laundry and old socks

won’t drown us on your return.

They have been put away to make room

for hours of closeness.

 

Yes, I have unravelled slightly

across this long distance,

so maybe I am different too,

and maybe I have put away things

that you will now not see.

But appearances are not us.

Experiences are not us.

 

The memories,

though I keep them close,

are not us.

Nor the friends that we know

(though they are loved)

or the miles between our feet.

We are the scent between us,

the force that joins our shadows

and our shadowed silences,

and all the colours between our skin.

Kamala Santos

Willow Pattern

I take the tray from your bedside table,
the pills are gone, the sandwich still on it.
I stare at the cracks in the plate you repaired,
and think about how it could happen at any time now,

according to the average life expected,
according to friends’ parents already departed,
according to the dreaded, the unsaid, the broken-hearted.

It’s turned my world on its head, to see him
lying, frail and sick in my child’s small bed, and I know
you’re meant to tell them you love them, before it’s
too late. But what if that was never the language
used? What if they never said it to you?

And now I stand in the hallway accused
by that terrible day, after you’ve gone,
of all the things I should have said and done,
that I should say and do now, but I don’t.

Oh, sweet, soul-saving grace, let me hear you
whisper the refrain, that love means to create,
that deep in my heart of hearts I know, the
spoken language of love, is only love in parts.

It was your acts of kindness that cried out at every
turn, and they were never, ever, expected in return,

It was always this:
the spicy scent of tiger balm
rubbed into aching shoulders, or, collecting me from
town at 4am, when bus and taxi had deserted the streets,
or, on the same night, a hot water bottle, found tucked
beneath the sheets by freezing feet.

And when I finally had a place of my own, you’d come bearing gold:
an alphonso mango, sliced and served on a
broken blue plate, and the same plate
returned within a week
healed, restored, complete,
super-glued fractures
that whisper to me now
love means to create; and recreate.

Karl Nkanyiso Sibanda

THE FREE NATION’S CPN:
A Captive o’ People Neutered.

Kronos and chromo-slaughter

 

Robin’s and Benjamin’s worth…

 

what could these Alexander’s fathom of 

a dream of Tweed from the Hebrides?

 

Due to the effects

the farmers dream 

mixed in with mayhem, 

those rocking through

 

Queens in sophisticated attire:

              be biting

         off this land 

more than they can eat.

 

There’s a boat that’s supposed to be special,

something that might save a sea 

from destruction but the deal between

strange concoction; 



acids versus alkalinity,

the vivid beauty of our social desire 





Said a gods simulation.

Leela Soma

Writing Life

Pen poised

Moleskin black, a colourful pen, pretty stationery

the idyllic spot. Nature speaks to me, write

Loch Lomond on a steel grey sky day

misted mountains, the loch a thunderous dark.

 

Pen poised 

words to etch on virgin white, blank now

a dream to write. Walk at the edge of the loch 

swishing boats, paddling ducks, nature a balm,

 a broken heart, words misunderstood, broken ties.

Lisa Williams

Listen

Listen 
To your own blood rise to the occasion 
Charge forth to ring the alarm 
Disturb the clean line of your smile 
You didn’t even clock was false
 
Listen 
To the petit marronage amongst us  
A warning in the pitch or tremble 
A deliberate slowing down 
A pregnant pause 


Listen 
To the old echoes on the wind  
The precious violin with which 
Douglass turned tragedy to triumph 
In this city of pompous stone
 
Listen 
To the crackle of effigies burning 
Over whimpers of hunger  
Men hurling carcasses of cats 
On the King’s birthday
  
Listen 
To the sons and daughters of Afric 
Run under midnight’s cover 
Broken collars crash to the floors 
Hungry babies wake to cry
  
Listen  
The essence of our hushed languages 
Gather in the hum of ancestors 
Shielding us from demons 
As we walk through graveyards
 
Listen 
To Our Long Rage Acoustic Device 
The conch, the drum, the song 
Boukman’s words still vibrate in the air 
Who is the God who has ears to hear?

Loraine Masiya Mponela

Ode to Loraine

despite your difficult circumstances

and everything going on

in this world today

you breathe courage

 

you inspire, encourage and even lift

those whose shoulders have fallen

make a way where none existed

you are a trailblazer

 

tackling big issues

you are not afraid

of losing friends either

for having uncomfortable conversations

 

giving hope and life

to those that feel faint

you touch hearts and minds

with your affectionate smile and love

you are blessed with a heart

bigger than Mount Kilimanjaro

 

you have made us all believe

that as long as the human spirit lives

life can be turned around

thank you for touching our Souls

this way.

Lyly Lepinay

Tongue Tied

Phone calls cut short.

Short of words, much less patience,

Can’t think of the word, so I repeat

‘How do you say?’ in Cantonese

The only phrase I pronounce perfectly.

 

I don’t question how I can say that term

That rolls off my tongue

So easily in my adopted one

Just not in the one my mother gave me.

 

Words of the Pearl River Delta once 

flowed from my mouth

as a child

Now my brain plunges south 

Thirstily

Into a desert 

Void of vocabulary. 

 

Seasons gone by, 

Downpours of words evaporated.

Dehydrated, my lips gone dry, 

Dessicated with dread as I trip over nine tones

As we talk o’er the phone.

My head says it right 

My mouth never quite.

I choke.

Once promising seeds of Cantonese words, but

Now only wayward weeds of sounds are heard.

 

Can’t make my parents understand

Can’t understand why they can’t speak 

Like the natives in this adopted land 

They made home seasons ago.

You’d think by now their English would flow.

 

They dug up their roots and planted them here

Yet not once did they fear 

That our origins would run out of oxygen.

 

I hang up.

Given up.

Like the chrysanthemum asphyxiated by the thistle.

Myla Corvidae

The Three Parts of Me

We sit in the kitchen while the men wait for masala omelettes and chai. The rest of us gather the kids for school. My aunt shouts from her stove top, listing all the things needed for the backpacks and we are all tired. 

I offer to make the chai but I don’t yet know how or have forgotten the recipe again. Grabbing halwa on toast with Scottish butter (my aunt says it’s the best kind) I rush the kids around the corner for school so we can both have five minutes peace from the chaos of an Asian family home. 

I return with buttered fingers leaving trails of crumbs through my hair. My aunt looks at me and rolls her eyes. I am a mess, having never learnt the knack of perfection. She hands me a cup of chai as the men leave for work and says exasperated: “Who’s coat is that jacket?”

One of the kids had forgotten and I hadn’t noticed.

“Gymeraf I e?” (shall I take it?) 

No sounds surprisingly similar across all the languages I am familiar with. I shrug and grab a paratha with masala omelette and escape to the local park. I wonder if the ducks in this country like paratha too… 

I had just travelled down from Scotland to visit family. Bringing irnbru for my grandfather, butter for my grandmother, butter for my aunt and tablet for the kids. I had a snack of haggis samosa on the train down, carried in a Cymru (Welsh) box and it seems the posh English woman in first class hated my food in all the cultures I am familiar with. 

Turns out ducks don’t like parathas. I asked them fit like anyway and buy some acceptable food from the local shop. When I return to distribute the goods I watch fat white bodies pedalling through brackish water. Brandishing even whiter ice cream they disrupt the birds. 

A man saunters by, notices my Asian sandwich and gravely informs me that “Geese don’t eat foreign food.”

I look at him, smile sweetly and say: “Wyt ti o ddifrif?” (are you serious?)

He marches off muttering loud enough to hear “I don’t speak foreign either!”

We are in Wales. We are in Wales miri jan (my dear).

Nasim Rebecca Asl

we are nine and playing princesses

arms spiralling like sycamore seeds
we careen from one end of the big yard to the next.
grey pleats fan from our empty hips like ballgowns.

scalloped socks sliding down our tiny ankles.
the plaits trailing behind our pigtailed heads are budding wings. 
you decree so we spin and spin and spin and spin 

until grass is sky and clouds are daisies then we tumble 
flushed, limbs skidding on tarmac, knees grazed, breathless, laughing.
if we lay down in our shadows we’d be dwarfed.

on bruised elbows i cross my legs to look at you.
when the war cry breaks out our classmates scatter like dandelion seeds.
i make a wish, then we’re up and running

from the yard, across the field, down the hill
away, away from the power of the boys nipping at our small heels. 
i am faster than you, a berry-brown waif 
already used to fleeing the thunder of a man

so your fingers stretch for mine 
and i pull you behind me
ignore my bursting heart
the mess of moths rising in the dust of my stomach
i can’t catch my breath but as i turn
to your buttercup hair my chin is glowing

you are the most beautiful thing my short life has seen.

and i don’t know what this means so i release your milk-bottle fingers
and let a boy with hair as gold as yours catch you instead.
i’m glad that he’s not old or bold enough to pucker up.
your lips stay apple red. 

after school i open my snow white diary, write

                               i’m scared I might love girls

reread my unjoined letters, bury them 
in felt tip, slam shut the book then hide it
in the shadows under my bed.

Niall Moorjani

Bahut Swadhist Hai: Or, I Love You Dadima

I fix a picture of her in my mind. Framed by the creams and browns of her kitchen. She is a tiny figure, hunched under a sky blue cardigan and snow white hair. Steam streams around her wonderfully wrinkled chestnut brown skin. A spoon is lifted to taste. Hard to tell if she is pleased.

Soon the table is full of small steel dishes which perfume the room. Daal Makhani, rich and brown, Sindhi Aloo luminous yellow, pale papad, saffron sprinkled rice and clay red murgh masala. All ala Dadima.

“Ab kanah bahut swadisht hai,” I say in badly pronounced Hindi before I have taken a bite because I know that it will taste delicious.

Then I spot a deep pot full of vegetable oil. “You are making puri?!” She hasn’t made puri in years. Seconds later there is a divine and yet everyday transformation, as the first dough disk inflates like a hot air balloon into a golden shell, what a smell…Puri.

Before I know it three are placed in front of me and I rapidly stuff one with everything else, fingers burnt for my impatient endeavours.

All worth it though.

The first mouthful.

Bliss.

She doesn’t eat with me, she never does. She instead keeps my food supply endlessly topped up. Years of practice have taught me to strategically announce I am stuffed when I’m only two thirds full.

Because, “You can eat more beta,” she dismisses.

I can, and do, gratefully. A fit to burst belly means much more to her than my thanks.

After, we move into the living room. Same colours as the kitchen.

She seems sad today, I wonder if she is lonely, missing Grampa, both, or neither. I ask her if she is ok? “Life goes on beta.” I think about our relationship, how I don’t really know her.

She excuses herself to pour chai.

She doesn’t really know me, she doesn’t know I’m non binary, I hide it like my tattoo of a selkie (seal and human and wholeheartedly themselves). She would disown me if she knew about either.

She never says, I love you, not aloud.

I want to tell her I love her and bring joy to her life. But words seldom reach her. Instead, all I can do is happily accept the chai given to me and although she doesn’t really know me and I don’t really know her, when she asks if it is good, I sip.

And say,

“Ab chai bahut swadisht hai Dadima.”

It tastes very delicious indeed, or, I love you too.

Nichelle Santagata

Mirror Movements

I’ve been dancing to 

My own love songs 

With Myself 

In front of the

Mirror

Each day.

 

I dance as if 

I am two lovers within Myself-

One lover in the past, and

One lover in the present.

Both of Me dance around 

Each other, endlessly, trying

To make sense of My connections

And disconnections-

Meeting and leaving at 

Different stages of 

My life.

 

I see My entire journey 

In the Mirror. 

I see

The severs

And sealings

That are beyond 

Skin deep.

 

I continue to 

Embrace My new tempo 

With whichever way I flow.

 

I stare at Myself 

In the Mirror and

Remember to 

Keep loving 

Myself and 

Keep Moving

Myself

Each day.

Nikki Kilburn

Blood

Memories swirl like tea leaves in yellow breasted finch coloured water,

I bleed floating beneath this heavy soil,

The creep of loneliness tapes my eyelids shut

An Alaskan owl chick eats three lemmings a day 

A tree wrenched out by the storm 

Survival a cold-blooded business.

Unravelling the hurt with every stitch I weave together the black mist of this reality.

A base mix of unlawful foundations, and opaque truth built an unsafe home 

Generations lost rattling around endless grey walls, 

Nature dictates cycle, the sacred roots of our stories maimed, women sacrificed,

A silent agony of muffled screams; each sorrow committed to marking the typography of its painful history.

Our wombs fill their cups with rivers of blood, washing away their sins keeping their secrets buried, 

Freedom guarded; forced to pass down a legacy of physical protection and heeds from the cauldron of psychic wounds. 

Her story of vulnerability and shame, a source of power, suspended between domination & resistance, we clamber for luminescence, 

A living carved from the heroine’s journey of reclamation innately born into our blood. 

Patiently unravelling the knots, the language of emotion a rupturing storm,

When I was buried deep where eyes can’t pry matriarch you were there to hold my hand 

A mast to help me stand a force pushing one foot in front of the other

Sisters in arms you fought the battle when I was bruised and defeated

You spoke strength into my ears when I felt only loss and lived in scarcity

Wrapped me in blankets when I was withered and torn by loneliness. 

A prison of surrender, release from death, reborn into the abundance of our sacrifice.  

Raman Mundair

Untitled

Dripping,
          like a ripe mango
you bring them to their knees
silk chakra, fur orchid slit
discerning, generous, embracing-
home to deepest desire

 

you ooze reviving nectar 
for lucky tongues who feast
you deserve the 
mouths that worship you
you deserve the
the deep, searching want 
and butterfly fingertips

 

yoni, of mine    
I covet you
I protect you
I gatekeep 
            for you
I tend to you
I breathe deep for you.
Come, come, come

Roshni Gallagher

I’ve Been Hiding

The ridge of the fish bone

mountain rises in air out of my dreams.

 

Sand dunes fall

in the grey stacked roof of the city. 

 

The light shifts and catches 

the bright belly of a gull. I’ve been hiding – 

 

out in the hush and howl. 

Deep in the splintering sea

Sanjna Yechareddy

An Ode to My Hair

This is an ode to my hair
my hair
I mean, my mother’s hair
once my mother’s being
covered in amniotic fluid
My hair
is still
my mother’s.


I discover this
when I declare my will
to sever all strands
from my scalp
leave behind nothing
Her rage burns through
histories on my head
preserved in fingerprints.


Once in an operating room
Mother faced her professors
as they dissected her short curls
instead of cubes of cancer
You cannot cure as a woman
if you don’t look like one.


Now illness is the air
that carves my mother’s body
blossoms of exhaustion
planted in open incisions
we heal, if only for a brief moment
when her rusty needle fingers
string coconut oil crystals
on my long, black tendrils
they flower over my shoulders
because my mother wills them to
growing from roots to nostrils

from lungs to nails
slippery regeneration.
weaving together
our shell-skins.
To claim
that this body is my own
is to forget this.
Is there nothing left
to bind us now
than keratin?

Sean Wai Keung

autumn

these train stations are full of leaves

and so are the people

while above them small chattering birds fly through

floating thoughts of times spent with each other

of memories of kisses of warm communal meals

 

i remember

you told me that day it was true – that leaves are meant to fly

not be crushed underfoot

 

today i had to tell myself it was true – that at some time before all this

we sat together on the same seat-couplet on a train

heading for a beachy daytrip far away from here

 

if i was a leaf i wouldnt want to be a train station leaf

to either get in peoples way or to be swept away

 

no if i was a leaf i would want to be the leaf you picked from the ground that day 

the leaf that blew into us as we walked together beside the rickety promenade

after i scared away the dead-eyed seagull staring us down

 

you remember

that leaf you placed so carefully in your bag

telling me that you wanted to take it home with you

as an object to remember 

our universal truth 

about leaves

Shasta Hanif Ali

Sipping on Spice Infused Chai

Seasons changed around him
undisturbed craggy hills above thirst quenched fields
dusty sunbaked plains cracking
under each bare footed step


One chilly bittersweet winter
reluctant and torn
the motherland frantically whispers
of families and kinship,
of dreamless nights beneath the stars
twinkling under the wisdom of ancestors


Of evenings sipping on spice infused chai
brewed over an open fire,
the infusion of aromas wafting over age old traditions
gently warming the chills of the elders tales


But lands afar summoned
with endless promises in an unfamiliar tongue
of bountiful opportunities,
prospect and securities
for the family yet to be


Here I sit decades later
at the end and beginning of a pathless journey
loosely fitting around the prism of cultures
lost in translation between a myriad of languages


Yet, I see no stars in the skies
but wisdom, your wisdom, finds me in other ways
deep in salah, when I fall into sujood
with open stretched palms,
in the silence of sabr


In fragments of memories
of forgotten tales and tribulations,
in the twinkling of young eyes
reflecting kindness over generations


As I sit sipping on spice infused chai
with a shortbread on the side,
it suddenly makes perfect sense
that although you’re neither here nor there,
You are in fact, everywhere

Sophie Lau

ode to a lost seoul

일몰

feel your pull 

tu luz 

too loose

for me to comprehend

close my eyes

take me back to when

persimmons and pomegranates stained your skyline

 

오미자

oh you are

a dream i swirled in my cup

sticky sweetness a testimony to times gone by

skeletal towers presenting a path to the sky 

i sipped you to the very last drop

consumed you all but i couldn’t stop

ta chaleur dans mes os

a memory i can’t let go so

you linger on my tongue still

 

일출

homogenous people

leave your dreams at the door

know you can never wish for more

carried down cancerous capillaries 

defined by dystopian reality

сейчас сижу у твоейреки 

i see

everything we lost

 

서울

i miss your soul

how many spirits have you destroyed?

pageantry and puppetry we are but your toys

frameworks for existence pressing in

turn to debased desires 

origin of sin

dévoyés

tous noyés 

why wait when we know

our bodies will sink to the depths below

nourish otters we never knew existed

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