Saikou Colley is a 20-year-old emerging journalist from Brikama, The Gambia. As a teenager, he travelled to Qatar as one of the thousands of migrant workers whose labour helped make the 2022 FIFA World Cup possible. In this personal essay, Saikou reflects on the promises that drew him to Qatar, the hardships he endured there, and how those experiences changed his relationship with football, a game that he once loved.

Through this poem, a 19-year-old college student in Bangladesh writes about her mother, a garment worker and single parent facing retaliation for organising with colleagues to demand unpaid wages. Through the daughter’s eyes, the poem traces the pain, fear and quiet courage of a woman who irons other people’s clothes every day, yet refuses to be folded by intimidation.

Written after the death of her cousin, who was electrocuted in a textile factory accident before she turned twenty, this poem is by a 29-year-old Dalit woman from Karur, India. The poem comes from grief, anger, and memory, and is a refusal to let her cousin be forgotten or remembered as anything less than a daughter, cousin, and young woman with dreams, laughter, and a future that should have been hers.

Five-Star Rating is a poem written by a 24-year-old delivery worker in India as he moves between orders, college classes, part-time gigs, and the quiet pressure of supporting his family. Written in his own words, the poem captures what it means to survive inside a city that depends on your labour but rarely looks you in the eye.

Shared in Tamil by a 28-year-old garment worker from Erode, India, this poem traces her journey to Tirupur, where she produces clothes for the world. Through memories of home, work, debt, and longing, she writes about her deepest dream: the day her mother can finally sleep without fear of debt.