Poems

Shiloh Phoenix – TCK poems

The Two Are Not Alike
by Shiloh Phoenix

In Maforay tonight
it is raining
pounding splatters on a tin roof
and the dark is warm wet barrels
full of hopeful promises
that we will plant in the garden
tomorrow

In Reading tonight
it is quiet
cracked sidewalks lining houses
and the dark is yellow paned glass
full of cautious doors
that don’t ever open for
strangers

My soul sleeps soaked
in Maforay rainy season

My body breathes blasphemous
in Reading summer heat

and i am nowhere much

{I’m disintegrated tonight, divided between places where I don’t belong.}

I’m still peeling from that sunburn
by Shiloh Phoenix

The tree today is supple and heavy
laden with the weight of too much rain
but where you are the sun is an
Egyptian god, relentless in his dominion

If I can carry this sunburn
across the Sahara skies
could I bring back my hands
cupped full of water?

Life never works the way I
want it to
and neither do you
oh Africa, with your back turned to me

Once I was yours
now I am a lost memory
swinging slowly in these trees
that are not the same at all

{and its a constant reminder that my world is small – small in the millions of miles}

Lost Souls of Africa
by Shiloh Phoenix

“it’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you”

I once had a friend
just black enough to be called
n****r by strangers in Alabama
but too white to be mistaken
for Senegalese
She left Cape Town years ago
but she’s still tasting the
warm salt of Africa’s ocean
in her dreams
and she told me
even though winters in Minnesota
are bitter cold
they never numb her longing

My brother, black as the dirt
his mother farmed her whole life,
black as the silence about his
missing father, wrote me a letter
from the psychiatric
hospital where they put him, telling me
that he feels like he is losing
his whole self in a war against himself
and he doesn’t know who he is anymore
I replied that California
is where people go to get lost
not to find themselves
Go home, my brother
you are a prince in your own land
though the doctors here have
named you psychotic

To the lost boys of Sudan
I too have watched my workplace
throw out food, and I too have done
the math of how many people
that could’ve fed, and I too have wept
for the stories I cannot tell,
the people who do not know how
to care or even understand

Two years ago I watched
a little white girl
pack up all of her things
and get on a plane to Sierra Leone
but she was too young to know
what she had gained
and what she would lose
or how mirrors never tell
enough of the story

I have never met a land
so alluring as Africa
I have never known a people
so full of yearning
as the lost souls of Africa

Today it is a cool and grey afternoon
in south-east Pennsylvania
and I am gathered with a crowd
of black boys, laughing at each other
in Swahili, wearing skinny jeans and
Nike sneakers while they pore intently
over their English homework
They are too new to know yet
how much they’ve lost
and I will not be the one to tell them

{Opening quote is from “Africa” by Toto}

Grey-Green Rain
by Shiloh Phoenix

Why would you go back
she asks
Isn’t life better here

i smile
Depends what kind of better

Financially
she nods

i shrug
I guess so
but some stuff matters more

her eyes are intent
above the rim of her mask
but i can’t think of how
to explain
the warm freedom of Africa

grey-green rain
i remember
heavy mountain humidity
mango juice sticky
palm trees bent wind
smoky night on red gravel
dust and dust and dust

ashes on the breeze
hunger boiling in pots
whispered songs
starch stiff in the schoolyard
stars enough to bathe in

hot breath sweaty
bus tilted in red mud
roosters’ indignation
choking silt water
bare feet on firm dirt

baoba fuzzy sugar
glass soda straws
ice cream wet plastic
wrinkled skin rough
hope enough to taste

she is waiting
my tongue is wet
full of colour and memories
but no words

Other poems by Shiloh Phoenix
Other TCK poems

By CulTuremiKs, ago

CavalierEternal – Immigrant Poems

[i couldn’t pick home from a lineup]
by CavalierEternal

red dirt soles
naked in afternoon sunshine

the asbestos dust
hooked to my left lung like a birth mark

knee deep in this man made lake
awkwardly wrestling a foreign first tongue

sunderland summer
by CavalierEternal

sugarloaf mountain peaks
outside our window, I will
climb her tomorrow I promise
go into town in a good shirt
you wear the new dress your
mom sent when she asked —

are you happy with her, yet?

I could have sworn you would
leave then, curse me, call old
friends, smoke two packs of
cigarettes, take the car to the
river edge where we met in
the muddy bed once.

I never said you should come
back, I folded your things in a
suit case at the door with a
note I wrote I am less than
enough to satisfy wanderlust.

you said those are my father’s
words, my mother’s curse, the
sound a door makes as it closes
is physics not proof everyone
leaves you.

i am talented at leaving
by CavalierEternal

I leave this city
with her angry barricades to you

I do not want
these humid summers
her dull sunrise doused in grey
you keep the drunken streetside arguments
for your 2 a.m. lullaby

I leave the east coast
with her tired history to you

I do not want
these hurried movements
her densely packed den of strangers
you keep the frigid winter coastlines
like a still life portrait pinned to your wall

Follow CavalierEternal on AllPoetry
Other TCK poems

By CulTuremiKs, ago

Childhood Poems

Only In Sleep
by Sara Teasdale

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.

Only in sleep Time is forgotten —
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild —
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?

More poems from Sara Teasdale

The Stars Are Not The Same All Across The World
by Shiloh Phoenix

My first memories include
tile floors cool beneath my feet, fans
blowing endlessly while the crickets
sang in the dark and the world was quiet.
The stars were always out, there, always
brilliant and near and crowded in the sky, like
there were too many and they couldn’t hardly fit.

I grew up there, in that place of chickens
at dawn and sheep wandering grey in the dusk
and fires blowing ashes and smoke all around
the dust of the land, the dust of the people.
We were a large group of family, brilliant and
crowded into the village, like if one more mother
gave birth to one more baby maybe we would be
too many for the space. But somehow, we learned to
condense ourselves into tangles of bodies and there
was always room for one more. Just one more.

I lived years and years of the sun rising every morning
and water sloshing new into the bucket, dredged up
from the earth with the modern miracle-gift from the
tall yellow-haired men so long ago. Our parents told us
those stories, about how the white men gave us
life from the dust, how their machines brought pure water
right here, to our village, to our home. They did not tell us
about the chains that came before that, about how it was
only right the white men come back with life to give as
payment of their debt, about how their restitution could
never make up for the generations lost. No, our parents
lived small stories in a small world and it was enough
to teach us the ways of our grandfathers.

I heard, though, from older youth, about sleeping
in the slave castles next to the ocean, tasting
the salt of the air and the leftover tears, wearing the
disintegrated chains of other grandfathers and remembering
that if we forget that history we have lost something.

But then I grew up and followed the footsteps of those
slaves to the land of their sorrow, I stepped onto that blood-soil
and tried to make it a new home. Tried to redeem it.
In this new place, the stars are faded in the sky, lost in
the vastness of electricity and development and busy.
Even if we had time to stop and look up, we would see only
the reflection of our own lives staring back at us.

Other TCK childhood poems

Dar es Salaam Delicacies

Story of a Little Girl

By CulTuremiKs, ago

Josh Gibson Media – A Different Time

Josh Gibson Media – “I think the hardest part is not the memories themselves, but it’s searching for the box of memories and realising how far under the bed it is hidden, and how far away that world has become. But Sometimes it’s important to remember, even if it hurts. It’s learning to let go, whilst not forgetting. Its learning that there was a time for that, and there is now a time for this. Holding on to the memories of a place once called home, and knowing things have changed since. And when no one else can understand, because no one else has seen. Its remembering that God understands, God has seen, he was there. He’s collected those memories, the good ones and the tough. And that…that’s more than ok, that is enough.”

Josh Gibson is a London-based content creator with an eye for detail and a passion to create. Check him out at his website –https://joshgibsonmedia.com/

By CulTuremiKs, ago

The Airplane Pillow – TCK poetry

The Airplane Pillow

I’ve been sleeping on an airplane pillow all this while
drowned in a white pillowcase
folded over and set at the top of my mat
and the impermanency has etched itself
over top of every memory I have here
I always knew I wasn’t meant to stay

But somehow that airplane pillow
folded over and over itself until it was
small enough to fit in my pocket, to go back
the same way it arrived; and all my hopes
got tiny too, squished and soft and transportable
like maybe that could make up for the rest

But it didn’t
and I left
everything
hopes and pillows
and all the rest
small behind me

~ Elizabeth Hemp

Click to see another poem by Elizabeth Hemp

By CulTuremiKs, ago

Just A House To Me – a poem about transition

Just A House To Me

  You had spent your entire life in one home:

                   your mom’s run-down condo in sleepy Antrim, New Hampshire where you
                   grew up eating inauthentic General Tso’s chicken at Ginger House and 
                   picking up sesame bagels with cream cheese at Audrey’s 
                   on Wednesdays,

  knowing 
  everything 
  about your town, 
  your home, which step 
  in your staircase creaked, 
  the exact shape of the burn 
  mark on the left side of your fridge. 
 
                   The mahogany closet in your basement where you used to curl up at age 
                   4 to play hide-and-seek with your three sisters, the bookshelf you broke 
                   then repaired at age 10, the army green quilt you received from your 
                   grandma at age 13 that covers the twinbed in your room, in your home, in 
                   your town. 

  By the time I met you I had lived in over 25 places in 

       Korea                           England 
                      Tanzania
                      South Africa 
                      Kenya
                                       Lithuania
              Chile          U.S.A.

Some homes, some houses,

     never
     knowing 

     the houses
                 I lived 
     I was packing     unpacking,
              readjusting   new places.

                      thrill of leaving           Cockroach House,  
         bittersweet       goodbye     Mango Tree House,  
                   Jacaranda House, the comings           goings 
        formings          memories, never          feeling 
              rootedness.

     And maybe that’s why we had to end our relationship:
     I was a home to you, but you were just a house to me.

By Melanie Han, an avid traveler and a poet who was born in Korea, grew up in East Africa, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Boston. She has won awards from Boston in 100 Words and Lyric, and her poetry has appeared in several magazines and online publications, such as Fathom, Ruminate, and Among Worlds. During her free time, she can be found eating different ethnic foods or visiting new countries.

Other poems by Melanie Han
Can I Roll, Slice, Stack Memories?
Dar es Salaam Delicacies

By CulTuremiKs, ago

Language Miracle – a third culture kid poem

Language Miracle

I came home
from school one day
and you were gone.
Mom said it was because
you missed Grandpa and
you missed Korea and
you didn’t wait for me
because you were bad
at saying goodbyes,
but I knew better.
You left because
you were fed up
with me, fed up
with trying
to teach Korean
to a granddaughter
who kept refusing.
So you went
back to your homeland,
a land I didn’t feel
was my home,
with nothing but
6,381 miles, 12 hours
on the plane, and
hurt between us.

“My Dear Yeast,
You know I grow up in Korea while Japan abuse
forbid speak our language as child force learn
Japanese language of oppress and change
my name to other country. Yoshiko, they call me.
Many word gone when release from Japan.
Japan burn thousand and thousand book
force study Japan forbid our language
prison for people who wrote our words.
Release from Japan regain our language miracle.
I proud of my people my movement regain
history country culture. Yeast, grow up
in foregin country no use our language.
And what do you know about war for our country?
Last wish for Yeast. Learn language.
Love,
Halmoni”

By Melanie Han, an avid traveler and a poet who was born in Korea, grew up in East Africa, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Boston. She has won awards from Boston in 100 Words and Lyric, and her poetry has appeared in several magazines and online publications, such as Fathom, Ruminate, and Among Worlds. During her free time, she can be found eating different ethnic foods or visiting new countries.

By CulTuremiKs, ago

Kimbap – To Die Or To Be White

Can I Roll, Slice, Stack Memories?


Hustle and bustle of lunchtime at Myeongdong Market. Fried chicken feet splayed out and curled at the ends, rows of hanging chilis in different shades of summer sunset, dried whole squids piled flat on top of one another, every tentacle preserved and intact. My eyes come to rest on a little pyramid of kimbap.


The predictable pattern of roll, slice, stack. Roll, slice, stack. The kimbap lady is about my mom’s age, same short, dark hair turning silver, apron wrapped around her once-slim waist, and suddenly, I’m staring at my mom standing at the kitchen counter of the house that we lived in when I was eight and insecure.


4 AM she packs my lunch for a school picnic. I get up not too long after, unable to contain my excitement. Will they be impressed? Maybe even a little jealous of my mom’s Korean cooking? Probably both.


But when lunchtime finally rolled around and the kimbap container was opened, all I heard were the quiet “Eww”s as I felt the slight shift of people moving away from me. My shaking hands found themselves tossing the kimbap into the open and hungry mouth of the trash can.


Their perfectly triangled white sandwiches, perfect pale skin, perfect light eyes (they looked easy enough to gouge out). Sunshine rested in their golden hair while night and fury nested in mine. Did I want to die or be white?


At home, that afternoon, I shut myself in the bathroom scrubbing my skin raw and crying my eyes dry until exhaustion called my name. The front door clicked and I threw angry words at my mom. She never made kimbap again. And I avoided Korean food.


But, I find myself in a trance, walking over to the lady and handing her a 1,000 won bill, receiving a roll of kimbap in return. My tongue is momentarily stunned as it remembers long forgotten flavors. All I taste is salt as I pull out my phone and dial for my mom.

By Melanie Han, an avid traveler and a poet who was born in Korea, grew up in East Africa, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Boston. She has won awards from Boston in 100 Words and Lyric, and her poetry has appeared in several magazines and online publications, such as Fathom, Ruminate, and Among Worlds. During her free time, she can be found eating different ethnic foods or visiting new countries.

Other poems by Melanie Han

By CulTuremiKs, ago

Tanzanian Rainy Seasons – TCK Poem

Dar es Salaam Delicacies

Nose pressed up against the window, I wait
for pitter-patters to turn to pelting poundings
as hundreds of flying ants rise upward,
dizzying my eyes and swarming my head.

So predictable: Tanzanian rainy seasons.

“Dad! Come on!” and he brings them as always:
bright yellow boots and clashing pink raincoat
with words on them I can’t yet read, words that
Mom says I’ll learn in school next year.

Tupperware in hand, I rush out,
dancing to a chorus of wings: a flapping frenzy.
Within minutes, I have plenty of the squirming creatures,
my prized possessions, enough to make Mom proud.

Back at home, the three of us busy ourselves.
Dad hangs up my dripping raincoat while
I tug away at endless wings while
Mom heats up the stove and readies

a drizzle of oil, a handful of flying ants, a pinch of salt;
sizzling in the pan, they fry quickly.
Then, around the table, Mom, Dad, and I sit,
munching and crunching our seasonal snack.

So predictable: Tanzanian rainy seasons.

And even though I lived through many of them,
I can no longer recall whether the flying ants
tasted more like bacon bits or burnt popcorn.
So I wait, nose pressed up against the window.

By Melanie Han, an avid traveler and a poet who was born in Korea, grew up in East Africa, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Boston. She has won awards from Boston in 100 Words and Lyric, and her poetry has appeared in several magazines and online publications, such as Fathom, Ruminate, and Among Worlds. During her free time, she can be found eating different ethnic foods or visiting new countries.

By CulTuremiKs, ago
tapestry colored knots

Complicated and Confident – Spoken Word

Complicated and Confident

by Ghanaperu

“The first year I came to this country, I swallowed down everything I had ever known and it slid down my throat into the darkness of secrets, or maybe just things nobody wanted to know. Either way I was empty, ready for the sunshine and breeze of this new world to wrap me up in a whirlwind strong enough to block out the rest. I should’ve known better, but somehow I still thought it would be that easy, that I would just keep my old secrets and build a new framework of identity and slide myself into it without losing too much. The first year I came to this country, I forgot everything I had ever learned and discovered a darkness of secrets inside of me big enough to block out the rest, but I lost too much.

In the end I found the pieces I needed, I dredged up my past and did not let it be forgotten. Instead I merged the old and the new together, weaving the different threads into a tangled mess of knots behind the scenes that nobody wanted to know about. I managed the chaos as carefully as walking on a black-night path except this time there was nobody to tell me how to do it with confidence and everybody was there to see when I tripped over the stump and landed in the thorns. Still, I wrapped my cloth around me like a bright mask or a new skin and when my new friends poked holes in it they discovered the whirling dances of a different country underneath, so they named me after my mix of colours and I blurred them all into something resembling stability. In the end I always knew that every story I told had holes and half-truths, but when I put them together they stacked into the pieces I needed to keep going so I held my chin high and taught myself confidence.

Sometimes, still, strangers ask questions. They see me and notice the blurred edges of my names, they catch glimpses of the holes in my skin and they wonder if I am really who they think I am. Mostly I reach into my jar of stories and I swirl the choices around and pick a truth to give them, something to cover up the things they don’t really want to know about. But sometimes I toss my head and laugh, unfurl the bright colours into a banner that declares – I am /never/ who you think I am – because I am not even who I think I am and I’m certainly not who I say I am and who am I anyway? Sometimes I spin in a dance they’ve never seen before and I tell them this too is me, sometimes I write them a poem full of foreign languages and can’t be bothered to interpret it. Sometimes, I am too much for them and I do not care because these are the pieces I need to make sure I don’t lose too much and the confusion of one stranger is a small price to pay for the gift of being complicated and confident.

You can’t catch me, I say, whirling away in a blur of secrets and stories colourful enough to block out the rest.

This year I met a stranger who tried. A stranger who chased after my trail of contradictions and picked up every half-truth I dropped along the way, came up to me with arms full of gathered pieces and told me – look I’ve found such a beautiful mess – as if the tangled knots of my underneath could ever be called beautiful. Messy, yes. I know my stories are messy, I know when my colours are spinning around me sometimes they stain the ground rainbow and I don’t know how to clean it up. But I held up the secrets I had hidden away in the darkness and discovered a mosaic of stained mess that even this country has chosen to name as art, and I wondered why it took a stranger to see that this too could be beautiful. Either way, I guess I was ready for the things nobody wanted to know to become the things I could choose to say, and I added them into my jar of stories imbued with every shred of confidence I have taught myself. After all, who else could show me how to wrap myself up in the sunshine and breeze of a new world without losing the pieces of my history that I needed, how to laugh at the edge of the night-dark and stand up to try again over and over until the blur of my stories swirled with confident colours? There was nobody there but me and the watching world.

So I built my secrets into a mosaic, turned the tapestry of my stories upside down and inside out to show the chaos, stacked my names into the holes of my half-truths and called it brave. Beautiful. A new kind of confident, a bold dance in the middle of the street with eyes flashing and feet stomping and hands clapping rhythms they learned somewhere far away and long ago, somewhere I cannot return but will not forget.

I’m not a line, I say these days. I’m a circle, looping back into myself like a repeating eight of infinity, an endless beautiful mess.”

Watch on YouTube here

Background audio is Turning Page by Sleeping At Last – listen here

More spoken word poetry from Ghanaperu

By CulTuremiKs, ago