A Letter to the West from the Sub-Sahara

My western and distant pal!
You have it plentifully seen!
You have it plentifully eaten!
You always trash the necessities of the Sub-Sahara
You have them in courses, so do you in sweet-coated and varied delights.
You consume and consume so much of them!
You get sated at the very peak of your insatiable appetites.
Your maximum gratification and enjoyment decline and become bland.
All an indigent Sub-Saharan like me can do, is just stare longingly from my want-stricken
And famine ravaged landmass.
You are hedonic, but I am miserable!
Your wasted crumbs are my daily fantasies:
Your discarded marmalade, Vienna sausages, Hungarian goulash, cheese and pizza.
I consume your coco-pops, Kellogg cereals and oat meals in nothing more than
My very best of dreams and fantasies!

​Steam

Steam rises from the bowl across the table.
Slow. White. Alive.

It curls into the air like something with freedom,
like it knows it will disappear
but rises anyway.

She watches it carefully,
the way other children watch cartoons
or passing cars.

The steam twists, thins, fades.
She times its vanishing.

No one notices she is not looking at the food.
Only at what leaves it.

Her hands stay folded in her lap,
fingers laced together
as if holding themselves in place.

The smell reaches her before the warmth does.
Rice. Broth. Something salted and kind.

Her stomach answers in a language
she pretends not to understand.

Steam was never meant to be studied like this.
Never meant to be someone’s only portion.

But she follows every ghostly ribbon of it
until the bowl across from her
stops speaking.
​
And the air goes clear again.

Theme: Childhood hunger

BIO: Rana Musleh is a student at Lehman College and a writer whose work focuses on dignity, hunger, and the emotional realities of food insecurity. Her work has been published by West Side Campaign Against Hunger and Poetry X Hunger. She uses poetry to explore how memory, culture, and inequality shape access to food and belonging. Through poetry, she hopes to turn awareness into empathy and empathy into action.