This prose poem investigates how defamiliarisation can be employed as a poetic technique that reconfigures, or makes strange, ideologies concerning the nation and cross-cultural encounters (metonymically represented by the need to express gratitude when experiencing hospitality). The poem draws attention to the defamiliarising power of prose poetry (as a quasi-narrative form) when attending to cross-cultural encounters, which are always at some level concerned with linguistic confusion and the hospitality that we rely on from others. ‘Arigato’ explores how the stylisation of prose poetry can be employed to figure cross-cultural encounters in new ways.