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is a poet and educator whose work has appeared in Root Work Journal , Huffington Post ,  Frontier Poetry A former First Wave Scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she earned her MFA in Poetry and This poetry thing will not save you."

Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine and numerous local publications. Our first date occurred under serendipitous circumstances- a rare Friday when I was not on tour and he I flew to Baltimore and he’d made the drive to meet me after the Friday DC traffic finally let up.

Yolanda Kwadey is a Ghanaian currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Florida. Her writing typically centers African women and race. She also enjoys genre-bending and has worked on Subtropics as an assistant editor. Prior to the MFA, Yolanda has been published twice in the Samira Bawumia Literary Prize Anthology by Ghana's former Second Lady for her creative nonfiction pieces: “Mama Doesn’t Know” and “Life Is a Baptism.” She is also a recipient of the Rebecca Elizabeth Porter Creative Writing Fellowship by the University of Florida. The Museum of Fiction “Do Ghanaians really eat eggs with everything?” I look up from my notebook and into his round face. The stubble on his jaw is scant, not as if he has recently shaved, more like he is inducing beard growth with some miracle oil. I know too many men like this, seen too many ads from Instagram pages back in Ghana. The trolley is crawling slowly into midtown Tampa, that part with the redbrick shop that screams “Cigar City” with its signage. I’m in some kind of war with my mind because I want to write about the city’s beauty, situate a character in it, let them wander about the roosters pattering up and about the city center, but I’m short of words. I think of why I escaped Gainesville for the spring break, but I can’t think of where to begin. There are the rains, and the acne’d students that swarm every part of the city like the plague of locusts in the Old Testament. There are the overwhelming courses with the underwhelming lectures, and the overthinking how to make writing interesting for anti-Humanities and entitled Engineering students with the writing capacities of a second grader. Then I look at the stranger seated ahead of me. He has twisted his body like a wrung rag so that he can look at me, so that I cannot escape his sunburnt and peeling face.  “What?” I ask. “Ghanaians and eggs, is that true?” He angles his phone towards me, and the street interviewer is paused. A Ghana flag covers most of the screen. I’m trying not to roll my eyes. I wish they would come up with a new stereotype – like we shower too many times a day, or we are too docile, or something truly egregious. The egg one is no longer funny. “I don’t know,” I say. Then the trolley stops, and I rush off to escape him. I wonder what makes him think I’m Ghanaian. I want to be angered that I may have been nationally profiled – if that even is a thing – but I remember the shirt I’m wearing, which says “Ghana, Ghana, Ghana”. I feel silly, but I convince myself that I am only distracted. Excited, too. I am disappointed that the strange man from the trolley has deboarded behind me. I move out of the way so that he can pass, but he lingers, joins me from the side as if I was inviting him for a conversation. The sun is scorching, and Tampa is bright, like a mirror reflecting light on a surface, the kind that blinds you. I’m immediately sweating on my nose bridge and my philtrum, and my forehead and my chin. I’m already looking around for a shaded place to sit, to write and plan this crazy plot. It is hard to work out the nitty-gritties of any creative writing plot when a stranger is loitering around you, harassing you with worthless knowledge of your identity. “Are you from around here? I came all the way from Macon,” he says. He expects me to know this place, but what is a Macon? I watch the hind of the yellow and white trolley disappear down the street wistfully. It is a callous joke to alight the same time as this man when the entire objective was to evade his nuisance. I recognize now that my instinct can be absolute garbage most of the time, and then I begin worrying about this ploy I’m considering. I hope I don’t have to depend on my instinct too much – the same one that encouraged me to move from Accra to a hot swamp in the middle of Florida for a degree in English. None of the other international students ever knew the point of that.  “So, you learn and teach English?” they ask. “No,” I say, “I read a lot of research and come up with theories.” “Theories about what?” “People,” I say, “Human behavior.” “Like Biology?” “No. Like social behaviors and the possible psychology behind it,” I correct. “So like Sociology and Psychology?” “No,” I sigh. “I can’t explain it.”  I suspect they believe I’m not very good at English because I can’t explain what I do in English at the English Department. I wish I can say, “English isn’t my first language” and get on with it, but not when I have left my investment job back in Ghana to come read and write in the United States. I wish I can say I’m here for creativity, for the secret craving for human creativity. They have burned away all those books, and the ones they liked too much are trapped in glass cages in museums. I want to read those and smell them. I have heard they had a distinct smell, like a wet tree bark and the smell of something else – something uncanny that ought to be smelled to understand. Grandma told us of them before she passed a few years ago. She is the last person I know who recalled what it felt like to smell and touch the human books, to traverse libraries and feel consumed by human creativity. “There is something sweet, fresh, delicious about them. And when we read, we could taste the words in our mind, and our minds stored parts we didn’t know until those parts stirred in us, and compelled us to write, write, write,” Grandma said. She caressed the air with a fist, as if she were grinding pepper with a wooden grinder in an earthenware bowl. “Why were they burned then?” I asked.  My sister was watching a cartoon movie very loudly in the living room, and it was overstimulating me from the verandah. The outside air was stale with heat, but we were safe from the scorching sun because of the awning. “There is a witchcraft to writing like that. You mix things that you know with things the world knows, and you pour time and sweat and blood and tears into the mixture, slather it on a page. That’s a covenant right there, between reader and writer, an education so subtle you have to read the very last page to realize it. I guess the world leaders didn’t like that a lot, and the businessmen were obsessed with the computers and robots doing all of it. People are more expensive than machines. More than you can imagine,” Grandma said. Grandma is the reason I read so much. I read old passages about books that no longer exist, licked to ash or shredded into pieces of incognizant letters and words. There was a museum in Accra, for the Ghanaian books that were written by human hands, but it burned down in a fire – mysteriously – and that was that. I never got to visit. There is an age limit, and it was gone by the time I was thirteen, so I have grown up with only the strange fictions written by the machines, wondering if human fiction was tamer or more mystifying. The Macon man has given up on the conversation, but he has to let me know. “You know, I just wanted to chat,” he is saying, “there’s no need to be so rude.” I want to ask him to define rude, to search its meaning on the internet and write a four-page analysis on why this interaction is rude. His face is still red and puffy, and some of the skin on his arm is peeling off. His nose is long, as if it is reaching out for me, hooked as if it is threatening to attack me. “Females like you end up lonely and sad. I suppose you’re one of those who believe in the articles about women being happier single, but I know a lot of single women, and they’re very sad,” he tells me. I can tell he is vexed, but I know it’s not out of empathy for the sad,   single women he knows. “You would think exotic birds would be more willing, right? You know, in Ghana, cats are not very likable because they’re too witchy,” I say. He flinches, too surprised to hear me speak again to notice my humor. I’m disappointed. I want him to know that I like my neighbors’ cats, and that I pspsps  my way down the streets when I’m not running late for a university lecture. He shakes his head and walks away, possibly thinking of old slurs for me, maybe something about eggs now that he knows that joke. I stuff my notebook inside my long, brown bag, shove it against the sanitizer bottle, the many cards – state, student, insurance, Florida Education Association, library, credit, debit – and the pale pink handkerchief. My phone lights up with a text from my mother, a long message wishing me happy birthday. I suspect there’s a prayer in there, blessings in Jesus’ name, questions about dating at twenty-seven, and how is school? I ignore it and let my phone show me the way to the museum. Tampa’s Museum of Fiction is one of the few left in the United States, and my digital map says it’s a ten-minute walk away from me. I’m excited. And nervous. I walk down sidewalks, wind around tall glass buildings, breathe under the shade of the skyscrapers and the trees that interrupt the sidewalks. There are people everywhere and pet owners walking the creatures they have adopted to fulfill a deep mental and emotional need that they themselves cannot reach. A few bare-chested men in flimsy shorts jog past me. Two years of experiencing this phenomenon and I’m still left flustered – should this be legal when there are still complaints about women in crop tops at the gym? I think I shouldn’t really care; I’ve only been to the gym once and when my biceps burned from flexing them with weights, I never returned. I don’t intend to. I’m sweating all over when I arrive at the museum. It is a strange building, pink bricks with many pointed roofs that gleam in the cruel sun. There’s a courtyard brimming with deliberately cultivated grass, and begonias and zinnias. The air here feels cooler. I inhale deeply with hope that I’ll smell the things people have described; stick my tongue out and close my eyes, hoping to taste what Grandma has promised. I don’t feel twenty-seven at all – maybe twenty-six and a half years old. Nothing inside me feels different. Nothing has changed. I’m still a Ghanaian immigrant, still as dark as the soot of a burned book, still of an average height, still wondering what I should be doing with my life. I have all these years ahead of me, but what for? There is a short queue at the museum entrance, but I can see inside. The floors are tiled a dirty white, but they glisten under the bright white lights on the tall ceilings. When a person in the queue disappears farther inside, they seem to shrink in size, swallowed by the sudden change in the ceiling height. The walls of the reception area are pristine but yellow, and I notice that as I move with the queue. Golden letters – Museum of Fiction – are burned into the wall behind the receptionist, who is scanning tickets and selling them. “I’m so sorry, the AI system is down,” she says, scrunching her forehead so that patrons believe she’s sorry about the situation. She’s in her late forties. I don’t think she’s very sorry about the situation. I imagine she’s a bit happy to finally be used, to prove that she’s capable of steering patrons the right way without complex algorithms and codes. The wall on the other side is scattered with unrecognizable names – single names only – like O’Connor , and Hawthorne , like Achebe , and Poe . I recognize the name Shakespeare  because of all the academic literature concerning him in my department. I know excerpts from pieces he wrote that have been destroyed. I found them both thrilling and underwhelming, and I was strangely certain that there is more and better out there, to read, to enjoy, to stir up words within me to write. I tap on the notebook in my bag. I am determined to write – if only I could read something in there and have my mind fed with the witchcraft of human creative writing…. “Ticket, please,” the receptionist says. Now that I’m towering over her, I can see the copper mustache above her lip. The bright lighting exposes the hairs on her face, the splotches of hyperpigmentation on her forehead and cheeks. “Now purchasing,” I say. I grab at the cards in my bag until the credit card comes out. The ticket is $45, but I pretend the number is meaningless, convince myself a fed mind is equal to a fed stomach. Then I walk into the giant hall and wait to feel myself shrink under the tall ceilings, but I stay the same. The ceiling and its chandeliers dangle far up over me, gloomier, unwilling to share the proximity with me. People, exiguous, linger in couples and small groups, trudging in and out of the five rooms.  The glass cases begin in the long hallway, and the first of them has a QR code. It connects me to a self-guided tour that begins with a woeful adagio. The voice is nasal and pitchy in a way that sounds bored, and when the guiding voice breathes – which it does many times – I think I feel my auricles warm up. It welcomes me to the Museum, warns me to only look and not touch because “longing oft leads to a downfall.” I am not inclined to obey, but I wonder about security guards, probe for hidden cameras. I feel watched even without seeing any cameras, and maybe it is those yellow hanging chandeliers from far above. I try to shake it off, blame it on paranoia, convince the little thief in me that the only downfall that awaits me is unbridled creativity that pours from page to page and beguiles rebellious readers. I have read of revolutions, and aren’t the leaders listed in history books ordinary troublemakers that broke a rule or law? I think of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, think of him slumped in a prison, drowning in the stench of his own urine and feces. Any confidence I have – if there was any – wavers. I hate the smell of urine and feces. The voice, flat and pinched, tells me about the long hallway first, about the stained glass on each end of the museum shaped like a leaflet, and how significant it is. I stare down one end, look at the orange-blue-pink glass, but it’s merely a rectangle – its symbolism is arbitrary. I wonder if this is a clever attempt to induce the patron’s imagination, maybe a wisdom that evades me, so I stare longer. Then I squint, tilt my head this way and that way. Eventually, I must accept that I have wasted my five minutes on this. I let the voice drone on but refuse to align my tour with its instruction in order to embolden the rebel inside. “The case numbered four has – deep breath – some of the earliest and most memorable gothic – deep breath – horrors.” But I am looking at the bookcase tagged as 11. To Kill A Mockingbird. I wonder why anyone would kill a mockingbird or imagine one and think to themselves to write all about it. Crime and Punishment . My heart delays a beat, my fingertips tingle, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. The hairs on my neck are upright, but I bend, and my face is inches away from the glass case. The adagio is playing mournfully in my ears again, and I’m taking a deep breath, aggressive and expectant, hoping to catch a whiff of wet bark and a special something. The air smells like nothing.  I keep walking, rubbing the side of my bag against which the notebook leans on the inside. I’m thinking what could happen if I could just see inside a book, any book. The self-guided tour noise is over. There are five large rooms – for Romances and Other Fantasy, for Crime, Horror & True, for Mystery, and two for Literary Fictions. The large Literary Fictions room is for westerners, and the smaller one – only eight feet wide – has three books from every other continent. The plaque above Things Fall Apart says, “For Diversity’s Sake”, and I understand that there’s no point in pretending when the media no longer exists. I take out my notebook and write words, something to remind me to search old papers and journals for diversity of creative thought – from when artificial intelligence didn’t have a monopoly over creative writing.  Each room looks the same, books minted in glass with dark, hard covers that reveal nothing. I repeat the rooms over and over again, hoping something will change, willing the $45 to mean something. By my sixth loop, I’m crying, and my lips are quivering, but I’m not sad. There’s anger and hunger, and my stomach rumbles as if to amuse whoever’s watching. I repeat my lap a seventh time and strike my notebook for every time there’s a man’s name, and an eighth time for every non-western name – exercises to make the ticket price worth it. The people I started with are mostly gone, vanishing into the reception area, never to re-enter, wallowing in their own version of disappointment, I suppose. The glass casings are too thick to break, and when I loiter in the Romance & Other Fantasy room, I reach out a hand, touch a case. There is no one around, the watching chandeliers are only in the hallway, and my hand is on a case. I pretend there is a transfer of creative energy, like heat transfers between bodies of differing temperature, that this woman – Margaret Atwood – is making a special covenant with me.  “Hey, no touching!” It’s a grim-faced man drowning in a navy blue uniform. He swats away my hand, yells at me, calls me a grimy, rule-breaking hooligan – a thug. When I apologize, he notices my accent and mutters something crude about the immigrants. Then he walks me out, out of the room, out of the hallway, and out of the reception. I wonder if he’ll ask for my photo to staple to a board of criminals, but when I turn, he’s gone.  I sigh and stare into the begonias, wipe my tears although they have dried into my skin. I glance back and consider returning tomorrow, this time, measure the thickness of the glass cages, this time, come prepared with knowledge of stealth glass demolition methods. I think of Margaret Atwood and her glass case, wonder who she was and what she wrote. I may never know. Then I look at my phone screen. My mother’s birthday text is still there. All this life ahead of me, but what for?  I wonder, all the way back to Gainesville, me and my empty notebook. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers .

for the Miss Sarah Fellowship and a finalist for the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Their work has been published in  POETRY, Muzzle Magazine , Shade Literary Arts , Stellium Lit Magazine

Shortlisted for The White Review Poet's Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award’s Poetry Prize, the Bridport Poetry Prize, the Derby Poetry Festival Poetry Prize and the Poetry Wales Pamphlet competition.  Review, Magma Poetry, Propel Magazine, Poetry Wales, The White Review, Stand Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, Bath Magg, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Anthropocene Poetry Journal, Lumiere Review

Soni Brown writes from the complicated spaces between countries, between family members who should love each other, between the person you were and who you're becoming. Raised in Jamaica and now splitting her time between Colorado and Montego Bay, she tackles the messy realities of identity, belonging, and family dynamics with unflinching honesty. She is querying her memoir about caring for a mother who abandoned her during childhood while asking brutal questions. What do we owe parents who discarded us? How do you heal from someone who can't even remember the harm they caused? An excerpt of the memoir will be included in an anthology of essays about adult child/parent estrangement, provisionally entitled  No Contact,  to be published by Catapult Publishing in 2026 and edited by Jenny Bartoy. Soni is a staff writer for Colorado State University Pueblo and a comic-memoir educator with Brink Literacy Project. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and earned fellowships from Tin House Summer Writing Workshop and Mendocino Writing Conference, plus a scholarship to PREE Writing Studio. Her essays and articles have found homes in places like Cosmopolitan , The Believer , Desert Companion , Sisters from AARP,   The New York Daily News , F(r)iction , and Africa is a Country . She wrote the screenplay for the documentary  Across the Tracks; A Las Vegas Westside Story. Her essay about leaving the United States for Jamaica after George Floyd's murder received notable mention in Best American Essays 2023 . She founded and facilitates the Papine Writing Collective, an online, do-it-yourself creative writing studio and community for emerging and mid-career writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora.  Haunted Paradise In Jamaica, we build shrines to our oppressors and call them tourist attractions. This thought occurred to me two years ago. I was driving from my home in town, passing the all-inclusive resorts that dot the highways of Montego Bay, on assignment for a travel magazine. I park outside the gate of Greenwood Great House. There’s a painted sign instructing visitors to “ring for service.” The ghosts of the past still demand we announce ourselves before entering.  A small woman appears to let me in, telling me “Mr. Bob busy but come.” I follow her down the winding path toward what was once a shrine to colonial power. To the left lies a fallow, fading garden where a carriage house peeks in and out of view. We emerge into what is situationally the backyard. Now it serves as the official entrance to this preserved piece of our painful history. What strikes me immediately is how ordinary this “Great House” feels—a structure that modern Montego Bay mansions easily rival in size and grandeur.  As I linger near the entrance, I notice a young family browsing the gift shop. I strike up a conversation with the wife hoping to get some pithy quote for my article. It’s a travel guide meant to attract Google's algorithm. My editor suggested a word-soup title: “Top Ten Reasons to Tour Jamaica's Plantation Homes Like a Native.” It's all kinds of wrong but I need a check. Living in Jamaica with North American tastes means constant compromise between my politics and my money.  The wife's expression mirrors my own internal struggle: curiosity about our past, anxiety about confronting it, and the desperate hope that somehow these preserved plantation homes might offer us resolution rather than just another sanitized narrative that erases our ancestors' suffering.  But resolution requires remembrance, and Jamaica has yet to build a single, significant memorial to the horrors that happened here. At least not on this side of the tourism corridor. Yet, here I am, part of the problem, preparing to write glossy copy that will bring more tourists to play golf and get served by people in colonial costumes. Greenwood’s owner, Bob Betton, is a Black. He returned to Jamaica after years working as a postman in the U.K. He greets our small tour group and explains how he acquired the property through serendipity. He got lost while driving one day and was mistaken for a taxi driver by Greenwood’s white owner. Bob gave him a lift to the house as an unexpected bond formed between them. Later, when the owner needed money, he offered to sell the property to Bob.   “When I bought this place in the seventies,” Bob tells me, “The white people renting the carriage houses out back accused me of being ‘a neyga man who wanted to punish them for slavery.’” It was a time of profound transition. Jamaica's socialist government had produced white flight. Families fled for Miami, fearing the country would follow Cuba's path to communism. Their exodus created space for Black political power. “All I wanted,” Bob says, gesturing at the polished woodwork, “was to turn this into a proper museum.” I nod, understanding what lay behind his words. This place, this “Great House,” represents both accomplishment and atrocity. A contradiction seen in its cut limestones quarried in England and shipped to the island.  As our tour begins, I notice how the young guide's narrative carefully navigates around the darker aspects of the plantation's past. We hear extensively about the Barrett-Brownings who lived here, their famous poet relative Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the European furniture painstakingly preserved in each room. When we reach the top floor, the guide proudly points out the spectacular view of the Caymanas Trench and remarks on how clearly you can see the curvature of the earth from this vantage point. Throughout the tour, slavery is mentioned only in passing—a footnote to the grander story of European achievement. When I ask direct questions about the enslaved people who made this house function, the guide shifts uncomfortably before sharing the plantation's most treasured myth. During the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, Greenwood was spared from burning because the owner was “a benevolent Master,” allowing his slaves to practice religion and learn to read. The story settles over our group like a thin blanket over a corpse. It technically covers the ugliness but does nothing to disguise its presence. *** Outside in the garden, I find myself wanting to feel satisfied with this nice version of history. The Christmas Rebellion—or Baptist War as some colonists called it—was one of the largest slave uprisings in the Caribbean. But what the tour and history books fail to mention is how women were instrumental in its organization, lighting fires across the island as signals for the rebellion to begin. The narrative centers men like Sam Sharpe while erasing figures like the unnamed woman who was the first person hanged for the uprising. According to records I've studied, her last words declared she acted so her children could be free. Where is her memorial? Where is the place that honors her sacrifice? I think about American plantations and their recent reckonings with the past—albeit imperfect ones. I remember the controversy when actors Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds held their wedding at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, celebrating their love in a place where hundreds had suffered and died in bondage. The backlash forced a public conversation about the ethics of using sites of historical trauma as picturesque backdrops for contemporary pleasure. Yet here in Jamaica, where most citizens are descendants of the enslaved, this conversation seems perpetually deferred. Instead, we adopted a slogan meant to attract corporations and foreign investors as our national ethos: “Out of Many; One People.” A comforting motto that erases centuries of exploitation with five simple words. I knew what this really meant—there is no distinguishing among the people who carries the legacy of enslaver and enslaved. We are all Jamaicans now. We had supposedly reconciled. Never mind the economic disparities that persist along color lines. Never mind that the descendants of the plantation owners still own the hills while the descendants of the enslaved clean their pools. This convenient mythology allows us to sidestep the uncomfortable work of confronting our history, replacing genuine reckoning with a marketable fiction that serves tourism brochures better than it serves justice. We've transformed plantations into tourist attractions where visitors can fall in love with the tropical vegetation and parrot our statement for casual indifference, “No problem, mon.” How long does a place remain hallowed because something horrific happened there? What does it mean when the descendants of the victims must serve as guides, smiling and recounting a history that erases their own ancestors' suffering? The past is not past. The dead are not dead. *** Years ago, when I worked as a flight attendant, I would greet tourists bound for Jamaica's golf resorts and all-inclusive getaways. Many of these paradise vacations were built on former plantations. Their names still proudly announce their heritage: Rose Hall Estate, Tryall Estate, Good Hope Estate. With a professional smile, I'd say, “Welcome aboard,” while silently thinking, “I hope my ancestors haunt you and you lose every damn bag and golf ball, maybe a limb.” The thought was petty, perhaps, but it was the only resistance I could offer to the ongoing commodification of my country's pain. Now I live in Montego Bay with my white husband and biracial daughters, and the contradictions of Jamaican society press in from all sides. The gated community near my children's school has become the social epicenter of our lives for playdates, birthday parties, and sleepovers. They all unfold behind those security checkpoints. There, I must show ID and submit to having my trunk searched a little too carefully. The guards are Black like me and seem to relish putting me in my place. Or perhaps that is the guilt I feel knowing that it is my kind that does this kind of work. The residents behind the gates are predominantly white or super light-skinned, their surnames appearing on company buildings and street signs throughout Montego Bay. Walking beside my husband through these spaces, I find myself deliberately leaving inches between us, embarrassed to hold his hand in public. My fingers twitch with the desire for connection but remain firmly at my side. I know why. I've fallen into the age-old trap that from the outside looks like self-hatred or, worse, the pan-Africanist who preaches Black love while partnered with a white man. I've researched the family I visit behind the Montego Bay gates, seeking to understand if they were among those who received compensation when slavery was abolished. Not the enslaved, mind you, but the enslavers, paid for their “loss of property.” I find some relief when I discover certain families arrived after emancipation, but the dynamics remain unchanged. I am still the Black woman dropping off her light-skinned children to play with white Jamaican children, a scene that has likely played out countless times on this very property over centuries. My illusion of equality shatters one evening at a "Paint and Sip" party hosted in one of these homes. A white European woman, whose accent betrays her rural origins but who has found unexpected status as an auteur in our color-conscious society, asks where I'm from. “Kencot in Kingston,” I reply. Without hesitation, she responds, “My maid is from Kencot.” In that moment, I understand that no matter how educated I am, no matter how “well-spoken” or professionally successful, to some, I will always be categorized alongside domestic workers. This is not because there's anything wrong with such honest work, but because in her mind, that is what Black Jamaican women are: helpers, servants, nannies, laborers who toil in the sun because as one Jamaican white woman told me, our black skin is better suited for work in the heat. The European with the maid from Kencot made her money in entertainment, appearing in music videos for reggae artists who need to fake foreign scenes. What fascinates me is how her whiteness alone grants her access to capital and social currency that would be unattainable otherwise. Her mannerisms—loud, brash, occasionally crude—would typically earn disapproval from Jamaicans if displayed by one of our own. Yet her pale skin functions as both shield and skeleton key, unlocking doors that remain firmly shut to locals despite generations of belonging. I recognize this dynamic because I live its mirror image: Jamaica-born but only welcomed into certain elite circles because I arrive on my white husband's arm. At these events, I become simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible—a Black curiosity granted temporary passage into spaces built on exclusion.  *** The next plantation on my journalistic tour is Bellefield Great House, home to the Kerr-Jarrett family for seven generations. Located in Granville, on the western outskirts of Montego Bay, the property manager proudly tells me that at one time, everything visible from the house to the sea belonged to the Kerr-Jarretts. Unlike the more ornate Greenwood, Bellefield has a utilitarian quality that supports what a member of the Jamaica Historical Society once told me. This structure was likely not the main Great House but rather housing for the head overseer, built close to the canefields and sugar mill for the convenience of management. The property manager is a woman about my age. She serves as my tour guide. I ask her directly, “What's it like to work at a place where people who looked like you and me suffered?” She pauses, considering her words carefully because she too needs a check. “More than likely somebody in my family worked here as a slave,” she admits. “When I was offered this job, I didn’t want it. But good work outside of call centers or hotels is hard to find in Montego Bay.” The call centers she mentions are themselves a creation of the Kerr-Jarrett family. They’ve introduced technological parks where multinational corporations can outsource their customer service operations to Jamaica's desperate workforce of high school and college graduates. The hotels, too, function as modern-day plantations with their six-day workweeks and below-industry wages. As we walk through the rooms, the property manager reveals darker aspects of life at Bellefield. “For the longest while, the family thought they were being poisoned by the slaves. They had a food taster,” she tells me. When family members died mysteriously, enslaved people were probably tortured and murdered in retribution. “It turns out the family was eating and drinking from lead plates and utensils,” she adds. I wondered aloud how many people paid for that mistake. At the sugar mill, a stone structure now picturesque with lichen and age is operating as a restaurant and bar. The menu is American food for a Jamaican palate. My host points to where the grinding mechanism once stood. “There was always a big slave whose job was to have a sharp machete ready,” she says. “For cutting sugar cane that got caught in the mill?” I ask. “No,” she replies quietly. “It was for anyone whose arm got stuck in the gears. It was faster to cut their arm off than to stop the ox walking in circles turning the gears.” I feel bile rise in my throat. A coldness washes over me. The violence of the past is suddenly visceral and immediate. This practical horror, the economy of amputation over production delays, captures the dehumanization of slavery more powerfully than any exhibit I've ever seen. *** Days later, I met my friend Angela for a tour of Rose Hall, perhaps Jamaica's most famous Great House. The owner of Greenwood had described it as owned by a foreign investment company that had “built a fairy tale” around Annie Palmer, the former enslaver said to have practiced Obeah to kill her husbands before taking enslaved men as lovers. “There,” he had said dismissively, “is the Disneyfication of our history.” Rose Hall allows visitors to tour the house and then relax with cocktails in what was once the dungeon area. The original bars are still visible but now part of the decor of a gift shop and bar. This transformation from site of torture to site of leisure epitomizes the problem: Jamaica is selling its trauma rather than memorializing it. “It doesn't have to be this way,” I tell Angela as we walk the grounds. “In Martinique, there's the Mémorial de l'Anse Caffard which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean.”  I explain that the large, Easter Island-like statues memorialize the area where ships arrived with kidnapped Africans. It’s also the site of an 1830 shipwreck where 300 Africans died while the 6 white crewmembers were the only ones saved. I recall meeting the artist at the memorial when I lived there. I told her I was overcome with emotion, crying openly while a white woman casually watched her dog relieve itself near the cliffs.  I stopped talking as I relived the memory. I gazed toward the supposed grave of Annie Palmer, thinking about what real remembrance looks like, when Angela interrupts my reverie with unexpected irony, “You know l'Anse Caffard literally translates to ‘Cove of Cockroaches.’” Even genuine attempts at memorialization carry their own contradictions. These illogicalities continue as we return to the house, where our Rose Hall guide—a woman about 25—speaks with what we locally call a “twang.” It's an affected accent that approximates American English, developed specifically for the tourism industry. The twang is both a tool and a symptom, allowing Jamaican workers to seem more familiar to American tourists while simultaneously erasing another aspect of authentic Jamaican identity. Even our language must be sacrificed on the altar of foreign comfort. We move through rooms where Annie Palmer allegedly poisoned husbands and tortured slaves, but our guide's focus drifts elsewhere. She points out the imported drapery, the fine China patterns, the exact thread count of period-appropriate bedsheets, and how often the paneled walls must be treated to prevent mold in the tropical climate. Outside the window, I notice workers setting up white folding chairs on the manicured lawn. “For a wedding later today,” the guide explains with a practiced smile. “We host plenty-plenty every year and in October, our haunted tours are quite popular. We have actors dressed as ghosts and Annie Palmer herself.” I hold back a sigh. As a young girl in Jamaican schools, I thought of Annie Palmer as something of a feminist icon—a woman who seized power in a patriarchal world, albeit through murder and manipulation. Now, I see how this “White Witch” nonsense transforms structural oppression into the actions of one particularly evil individual. It allows visitors to condemn her exceptional cruelty while avoiding confrontation with the everyday cruelty that was the foundation of colonial Jamaica. Not a single marker indicates where her murdered husbands might be buried, let alone the countless enslaved people who died working these lands. The guide proudly shares how much work goes into preserving the lawns—the irrigation system, the imported fertilizers, the daily maintenance. I think about the cost of keeping this grass green versus the cost of creating a meaningful memorial. Days later, I had a lengthy conversation with the owner’s wife of Good Hope Estate in the neighboring parish. We talked a lot about mental health before she made a careful distinction. The property belongs to her husband's family, though she lives and works there. Good Hope was purchased and restored to be a place of healing and health, she tells me. People book the Great House and the counting house to hold retreats. Psilocybin therapy and yoga where people can address past trauma were particularly popular and something she highly recommends. Above all, she says, they are a working farm providing jobs and economic mobility to many workers who live in the countryside. I remembered reading that of the approximately 7,000 Great Houses that once dominated Jamaica's landscape, only about 30 remain in decent condition. “Jamaicans need therapy, healing,” she says with conviction. “We carry generational trauma.” I nod, wondering if this could be part of our reparations package from the UK—access to mental health services to process centuries of colonial violence. Then I remember the price tag: thousands of US dollars for psilocybin therapy or even a night at a yoga healing retreat. Beyond the reach of ordinary Jamaicans. Reading my thoughts, she adds that she researched whether her family-owned slaves and concluded that the best she could do was become a “job provider.” This seems to be the moral solution. This economic framing transforms historical accountability into a transactional relationship that preserves her position of privilege while claiming to address centuries of wrongs. It echoes what I read about a prominent artist from the same milieu. It’s a benevolent identity that requires no genuine redistribution of power or wealth. You can almost set your watch to the eventuality that someone will mention a Black ancestor typically deployed to dilute responsibility for inherited privilege. This selective genealogical emphasis is common among Caribbean elites. They claim kinship with the oppressed while maintaining the economic structures their slaveholding ancestors established. Privilege constantly reinvents itself. I say nothing to dispute her rationale. She is a nice woman and I need her connections and patronage if I’m to get freelancing work on the island. *** Driving back along Gloucester Avenue, what I grew up knowing as the “Hip Strip” later renamed to honor reggae superstar Jimmy Cliff, I consider how Jamaica struggles to reconcile its past with its present. Tourism is our economic lifeblood, yet it often requires that we perform versions of ourselves we think tourists find pleasant, versions that don't demand uncomfortable reckonings with history. I think of Germany's concentration camps, preserved as sites of somber reflection and education. I think of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which confronts America's history of racial terror lynchings. These places say: here, something terrible happened. Here, we must remember. Where is Jamaica's place of remembrance? Where can we, as a nation, confront the psychic wounds that continue to shape our society? Social ills that range from our persistent colorism to our economic dependence on foreign visitors? How can we move forward without acknowledging where we've been? I navigate through Montego Bay traffic. I pass resorts, private schools, and gated communities built atop former British garrisons. I wonder what it would mean to create a space that honors not just the resistance of figures like Sam Sharpe but also the daily resistance of those who survived—those who maintained their humanity in a system designed to strip it away, those who preserved African traditions in secret, those who passed down stories and songs that would eventually become the foundation of Jamaican culture. Perhaps what we need is not just a museum but a national conversation about how slavery's legacy continues to shape our island. Not to assign blame but to understand ourselves more fully. Until then, we remain haunted, moving through spaces marked by unacknowledged ghosts, telling incomplete stories, and wondering why the past still feels so painfully present. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Additionally, Hooky received recognition from ARRI Camera by being featured on their website and social in pre-production for Missed Connections , a surrealistic dramedy and proof-of-concept short for her feature

Schyler Butler is the author of Phantom Hue (forthcoming from CavanKerry Press, 2027). A recipient of funding from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, her work appears in Obsidian , African American Review , Transition , swamp pink , and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University and lives in Columbus, OH.  Girl Says a Prayer   “…my hero felt so bad about himself once that he lit himself on fire…”   –Dave Chappelle - So I toss salt over my shoulder.    I ask for proof and am given a mirror.    I pour the brown but don’t know who for, light a candle and bless the horn-hiding lost of the earth, feed them leftover cake and wonder why these skin splotches come. I send my spit to a foreign lab  and trust they know how to read me.  --     I ask Amma for clues, and She sends  hungry dogs who know where to bite.    I talk all day about the beginning    and whose people were first,   but I wasn’t there. When She allows confusion, I am not thankful until, with practiced faith no longer fragmented, I choose to forgive Her. --- Death would have me bitter for eternity. Death wants me so dehydrated I choose to drink His piss and sing a lullaby of doubt.        ---- When I shut my eyes, I am a child sitting at Grandmother’s feet. Our fingers weave sustenance from threads.   She scatters false indigo on my shoulders. She reads the sticks left by our dead. She lights a candle and holds my chin, says I will tell a different story, one where I consume the fire. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and more. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Samantha Lamont Adams is a Black Milwaukeean, freshwater enthusiast, and Doctoral Candidate in English and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, currently completing a dissertation about literary and historical relationships between Black Americans and bodies of water beyond the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century. She previously studied Creative Writing and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is ever interested in the material and figurative qualities of water and the generative collisions between the sacred and profane.  candy’s cameo [new york, 1975] Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here I would have to be invented [...] In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. —Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987).  You are fantastical. —Candy Love (an actress of the Golden Age of Pornography), as Leona in The Erotic Dr. Jekyll  (1975) Yes,       yes,  every photograph of you was already taken before you stepped on set. despite this leaden american grammar in all its suffocating layers, you are coming. or so I hope. i cannot be vain and call this a project of recovery, for you have always been here, making love and rent  and kissing the beautiful face of your husband and laughing in a fake french accent, committing to the bit and crooning oh monsieur, fuck me please you have always been here on flickering film, frosted aquamarine eyeshadow, offwhite lace of the maid’s bonnet sliding down jetblack hair  your throat a tower gleaming in front of the gaffer your hand tugging at his hair guiding his tongue the stunning gap    between your teeth your hips rolling like water over his face you have always been here or perhaps you just arrived, walking onto set writhing atop low-pile pools of crimson and beige spilling just out of frame inventing yourself anew ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Jessica Araújo (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English at the Community College of Rhode Island. She has her MA in Literature and MFA in Creative Writing from William Paterson University.  Her works have been published in Sad Girl Diaries Literary Magazine, Wingless Dreamer, Cathexis Northwest Press, and  Midnight & Indigo. Call More Dead Mama hasn’t rested since the shooting. But not for the same reason as me. When I close my eyes, I see his face disgorging blood on a loop, as if some sick fuck has the VCR remote and keeps rewinding so I can rewatch him spurt blood on his white tee.  Bullet casings littered my driveway, right outside my bedroom window. He could have easily sprayed my bedroom window while he stalked behind my car.  My chest tightens every time I think of it, because what if it happens again and I’m asleep? What if I’m awake? Taking deep breaths to try and relax soon turns into shallow gasps, and I feel like him, like I’m retching on the last breath of life. That’s why I can’t rest.  Mama, she just stares out the window, eyes rooted to where it all went down. “All them candles and pictures, but no one had the sense to put a cross. Calls more dead if there ain’t a cross.” As if Death loitering in the parking lot behind my house is just what I need. Mama squints like she’s trying to see clearer, keeps mumbling to herself. All that squinting she’s doing, I know she can see him. Probably counting how many of the fifty rounds actually hit him. It had sounded like fireworks. We’re used to hearing fireworks. When I heard the racket, I kept sifting through the endless stack of papers analyzing “There Will Come Soft Rains” and how mankind will be its own destruction, and nature will scarcely remember us when we’re gone. The fireworks were a happy distraction. I didn’t clock that it was raining bullets a few yards away.  Until I remembered it was almost October.  Until I looked out the window and saw a black car, headlights off, speed past the stop sign. Until I ran to the window and saw people dust themselves off as they got up off the ground.  Until I saw he was the only one who didn’t get up. “Mmm,” Mama tuts. “That poor boy was no more than nineteen.” “Kevin,” I frown. “The news said his name was Kevin.” “Shame. Look at him, standing there, face covered in blood, disbelieving he’s dead.” Mama doesn’t know I’m scared of ghosts. She could see the dead since she was little, like her mother, her mother’s mother, and the many mothers before them, and like me. I learned conjuring before I learned my ABC’s. I love working with herbs and the elements to heal, to ward, to reverse.  But certain parts of spirit work frighten me. Spirits carry burdens with no vessel to hold them. Sometimes they seep into you and lay anchor, mooring you to their energy—sometimes without permission.  I’m fine with the sporadic visits from my ancestors because they come to protect me. I’m sure they shielded me the night of the shooting. But the dead should stay on the other side. And they mostly do. The ones who tend to linger on this side are the ones who have something gruesome about them, be it their deaths or their intentions. They’re not meant to stay on this side of the veil. Staying too long risks them turning to haunt. That’s why I’m scared of ghosts. A spirit doesn’t stay, but a ghost refuses to go, and it grows more dangerous the longer they’re here.  Mama won’t budge from the window, barely moving like a sentinel on guard. “You need to seek some help, baby. You can’t swallow this and think you won’t fall to shit. I came here because you need me, but you know I can’t stay too long. Besides, some things I can’t protect you from.” “I just need to move out of here,” I groan over my fifth mug of chamomile.  “I didn’t know moving erases traumas. What you need is help.” “What I need is sleep.” They come sometime after midnight. Mama and I watch from the window—from a sliver between the shades—in the kitchen. I had turned off all the lights, hoping to invite sleep. We watch three guys smash the candles lit in vigil for Kevin. One of them is filming it all with his phone. They all laugh when one of them whips out his dick and pees on the large picture of the dead guy whose ghost phases through their unwavering bodies. Kevin roars in the leader’s face, and I feel the ripples through the window, though they feel nothing—or pretend not to. It doesn’t take a conjurer to arrive at my next thought¸  That’s Kevin’s murderer.    The news reported no leads as no one wanted to testify. The neighbors murmured how his brother, who had stormed onto the scene too late for Kevin, and was said to be the real target, would seek “street justice.” But a week later, here the killer is laughing it up with his boys like getting away with murder is the world’s funniest joke. And maybe it is. After all, what is a life worth? He tries to shove them all away from his makeshift memorial. His rage thrums in my chest. Fortunately, he is too recently dead to turn vengeful. We can see it, though, Mama and I, how he wants to be the death of that guy and the losers applauding him. He will turn to haunt if he doesn’t move on.  Choking back sobs of impotence, I wipe my eyes and crouch down by the refrigerator, wanting to scream but scared that the killer might hear. That I might be next. My face is flushed with a million tingles that feel like spiders scurrying across my cheeks. The walls start closing in on me, and suddenly there isn’t enough air in the world for my lungs as I try to gulp enough oxygen to stay afloat, but all I keep thinking is that I might be next, might be next, will be next. “Don’t be silly,” Mama sighs, as if reading my mind. “You don’t even know that guy. Why would he hurt you?” Because he can. He already has my peace in a vice grip and doesn’t even know it. Imagine how he’d act if he knew. He’d piss on my pain for sport. Counting to ten, I focus on the kitchen table, on the vase of wilting roses in dirty water, taking deep inhales and slow exhales in between numbers. Inhale peace, exhale worry. I am safe, I am safe. I am safe.  When I reach ten, my breathing steadies enough for fear to take a backseat to the wave of anger rippling through my body. My upper lip curls as a snarl escapes from behind my gritted teeth. My tongue feels dry and heavy in my mouth, parched with a new thirst. For blood. “Mina,” Mama cautions. “Don’t.” “I need to end this, Mama,” I roar, tired of her just standing there. “You saw the same as me. Kevin’s going to turn vengeful as soon as he’s strong enough. I can end this right now.” What I don’t say is that I don’t blame Kevin for wanting revenge. That bastard stole his life. He shot into a packed park and didn’t care if he hit anyone else. Now he comes back and taunts the living by defacing the dead. Now I want him dead too. “Don’t you go turning vengeful now. You’re still alive. You’d be more dangerous than any old ghost.” “I know,” I smirk, knowing that I am powerful enough to bring a killer to his knees, to bring justice to a ghost. Invigorated by the current of rage, I pop into my bedroom to grab what I know will quench my new thirst. A conjurer has many tools, and I learned to use them all. After collecting what I need into a sling bag, I grab a ski mask and a hoodie from my closet.  “You’ll only fuel him with this, Mina. And you’ll hurt yourself. I can’t guarantee I can help you if you go down this road.” Ignoring her, I disable the security system and crouch out of the side door to the driveway. I slink down behind my car, just like witnesses say the killer did, and watch them. They are passing a blunt between them while Kevin crackles like an old TV. His ghost has grown. His wavelength is like a strong radio signal, and I am tuned all the way in.  I mix a few ingredients—knotted string, High John, and hemlock— into a small cloth bag, whisper a brief incantation, and fling it over my car to the basketball court. I’m right behind the bag, knowing they won’t have a breath to react after the pouch detonates. One of them notices me and reaches for something in his pants, but a silent flash goes off and they are all swept across broken glass and stomped bouquets to the same spot where I watched a cop give Kevin CPR until the ambulance arrived, until he died before it came. “What the fuck?” the murderer exclaims. The others are probably questioning if it is the high, if their blunt was laced, because they look confused, lost. “You murderer!” I hiss, my voice sounding deep, guttural, not my own.  “Who the hell are you? How are you doing this?” He struggles against invisible bonds, but it is futile. Until I release the spell, they can’t move. And they won’t be able to when I release it either.  Like a flower girl at the world’s saddest wedding, I scatter petals of wolf’s bane around us, uttering an incantation to conjure a cloak of invisibility. Even if they squinted hard in our direction, no one would see us, and not even a bat would hear us. “Now, we can have some fun,” I leer. “You ready, Kevin?” He looks at me, confusion spreading across his blood-stained face. I squeeze my eyes together to shut out the memory of him spurting blood and choking on air as he died. “Y-you can see me?” “Better than see you,” I wink, my voice still gruff. “I can help you.” “Yo, who are you talking to?” someone says from the ground.  “Help me what?” Kevin continues, ignoring the grumblings of the others. He approaches slowly, cautiously, his wavelength piercing my skin as he does. “Get revenge,” my lips stay parted as I hiss the words, my tongue firmly rooting to the roof of my mouth. The words are titillating, exciting me for what’s to come next.  Kevin’s ghost flickers brighter as he mirrors my sneer. He gets so close I could wipe the blood from his ashen cheeks if he were still flesh. The current of anger gets stronger, exciting and nauseating like sailing through a hurricane. He reaches for my hand, unable to touch me, but oh, I can feel him. I can feel  him. I can feel him. He lays anchor in me, and I see it all, a game of dice, a livestream from the park, the sound of fireworks, realizing it isn’t fireworks, a pinch in the shoulder, another in the chest, another—I break the connection. I don’t want to see. I don’t want to know. I want to let go. I want to… I bowl over and vomit bile that smells like chamomile and regret. What am I doing?  I look back at the guys on the floor, at Kevin who is now hovering over them. I can’t focus. I’ve never channeled the dead, always avoiding mediumship out of fear a ghost would lay hold of me and never leave. Now, Kevin’s rage has latched onto my own, overpowered my own, and has made it foreign, has made my body attempt to eject anything that steals my control. The nausea of fighting possession is too much for me.  “Let’s kill them all,” he says in a grating voice not unlike mine. “Right where he killed me.” Pointing his fingers like a gun, he mock-shoots each guy in turn, but it’s my chest that jolts. Clutching my knees, I bend over and vomit again. This isn’t the way. My body keeps trying to unmoor itself from the weight of Kevin’s energy. I cannot be his vessel.  “Revenge ain’t justice, baby,” Mama’s voice echoes throughout the dome. I look up, relieved that she’s here, come to make me right, but she is focused on Kevin. “Who are you?” He whirls on Mama. “You can see me too?” “I can,” Mama nods, approaching him slowly. “And I can tell you that killing them won’t help you find peace. “I had peace until this asshole came and took it from me,” he says, kicking right through the torso of his killer. But the guy flinches, as if he felt something. Latching onto me has made Kevin stronger. “I shouldn’t be dead!”  “You shouldn’t,” I say, fighting a renewed wave of nausea. “It’s not fair what happened to you. It’s not fair he keeps getting to go around and do more hateful things.” “But,” I continue when I see him clench his fists, his eyes stirring the rage in me once more. I swallow it and continue, “Killing them here would tie them to this place, just like you’re tied to it. And if you stay here and we add them to the mix, horrible things might happen to more innocent people. There’ll be more dead here, more people dying, and some of them might even be your own family.” He softens a bit when I mention his family, easing my nausea a bit, and mutters, “But he can’t get away with this.” “And he won’t. I said I can help you, and I will, but you need to move on. You’ll get justice, I promise.” His ghost dims, the frequency weak enough for me to break it with a quick incantation. Our connection severs, and I gasp for air, lungs heaving as if recovering from almost drowning. My body feels untethered until I focus on a shard of glass on the ground. Inhale peace, exhale worry. I am safe, I am safe. I am safe.   Mama takes the chance to reach for Kevin’s hand. Flinching at first, then dropping into her embrace, Kevin cries into her shoulder, and I want to run and join them, to lose this past week in a hug. Mama calms him so easily, but I know she won’t always be here to ease our hurts. Sighing, I remind myself I can’t fall apart again. Spirit work takes resolve. Living takes resolve. I cast a sleep spell over the three losers on the floor. I’ll deal with them later. “I’ll be right back,” I say as I jog back to my apartment. The dead-end street is dead silent at this hour, and for the first time in a week, it isn’t disquieting. I dart to my room and lift my mattress, leaning it against the wall so I can yank two loose slats from my bed frame. They’re far enough from each other that they won’t disrupt my sleep, if I can ever reclaim it. As I pull at the pieces of wood, I wonder if a mattress can slow a bullet. Each strike of the hammer sounds like a gunshot, startling me each time it hits the nail, even though it’s me doing it. Tears burn in my eyes as I hammer harder than I should, not caring if I hit my hand. When I finish hammering the last nail, I notice the angle of one slat is a little crooked, but a cross is a cross. I fill my sling bag with florida water, rue, ammonia, coffee grounds, a lighter, and a white seven-day candle. The cross is longer than me, but not heavy, so I manage to place it in the crook of my armpit. Back at the basketball court, Mama is holding Kevin’s hands, consoling him in a way she can no longer console me. Whatever she is doing is working. His ghost no longer flickers like an old television. Actually, he’s gaining some of his old color back, with blood smeared across a ruddy brown face. He’s more spirit than ghost now. But he still has to go. The longer he stays among the living, the greater the chance his spirit will get too far gone to be saved.  I take the florida water and sprinkle it on the cross and in a circle around us. Speaking prayer and liberation over the area, I sweep shards of glass and candle wax aside with my sneaker and stand the cross against the fence, positioning it so it won’t fall over, bending over to slap the ground in front of it three times to call on Spirit and my guides. Once I feel myself drop in, connecting to the spiritual energy on the other side, I am separated from the anger and panic of the past week, my tether to Kevin completely severed. I am just a blade of grass swaying in the breeze.  Rubbing rue and coffee grounds together, I call on the most high and my spiritual team to allow me to work in the name of all that is good, to free all the dead holding on to this place past their time, to cleanse this space of any residue of evil here. I sprinkle the rue and coffee mixture in the four directions, followed by three drops of ammonia. After lighting the candle, I hold it above my head, turning as I present it north, east, south, and west. Then, I kneel, eyes closed and palms to the sky, and continue praying as my body continues humming with spiritual energy. A white light grows around Mama and Kevin when I finish my prayer.  Hesitant at first, Kevin takes Mama’s proffered hand and lets her guide him into the veil. He looks back at me, nodding as he dissolves into the brilliance of the beyond. “You find your peace too now. I’m more comfortable protecting you from the other side, so don’t make me come back,” she admonishes with a smile as she fades into light. Body still swaying, I rise from the ground and fight the urge to reach for Mama, knowing it’s futile to try and touch her one last time, so I place my hands over my heart and nod. Breathing deeply as I ground myself, I rub my hands and neck with florida water and walk back to the house. I inhale deeply, feeling more peace than I have in weeks. And more resolve. Back in my apartment, I call the police and report the vandalization of the memorial and how I heard them bragging about killing Kevin.  “They’re still there,” I say to dispatch, which is true—I didn’t undo their bonds. I don’t release the dome of invisibility until I hear the sirens, and I don’t release the binding spell until I see the cops through my kitchen window, struggling to lift them off the ground. Relief manifests itself in the form of tears streaming down my face, and I cry until, for the first time in a week, I collapse onto my bed and finally rest.  ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Deanna Whitlow is the founder of Same Faces Collective . She completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia College Chicago. Pushcart-nominated, her stories and essays have been published by Raging Opossum Press, Allium Journal , Black Fox Literary, Identity Theory, Mulberry Literary,  and others. The Laundress And the work can be beautiful sometimes. I think this as I sip coffee in the darkness of dawn. I believe this in the same tentative, wanting way I believe in God. I look at my hands. I have scrubbed and wrung and ironed so much that my hands are my winter shade all year round. The skin between my index and middle finger could pass the paper bag test. My palms itch. There must be money on the way. Yes, the work is beautiful. I make things clean. Like a pastor. Or a rushing stream. I have even reconciled its endlessness because I am still catching up on my mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s old burdens. The ritual of it is a little like prayer so sometimes, the work itself is God. And God is beautiful. So the work is beautiful. I smile. The work is beautiful, so I wake earlier then I need. Before the children and the sun and the radio evangelists. I fill my cup, drink slowly, and pretend I am the sort of woman who gets to wonder what else there is to do when the coffee is finished. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Bards Anthology , When the River Speaks , Voices de la Luna , Voices Along the River , and has been featured on Best of Button Poetry . She has featured at a number of local venues and is the 2024/2025 Poetry Grand Slam Champion of San Antonio