My host mom and I had a wonderful relationship, but that Friday evening was the first time I had lied

Jones as the winner of Hub City Press’s BIPOC Poetry Reader Series Prize. Stewart-White’s work has been featured in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo Her poem “Healing” was featured in the award-winning NAACP anthology This is the Honey, curated by New It was also selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the Boston Review’s annual poetry prize.

She received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, and is currently at work on a poetry manuscript

Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga is a third culture kid who’s allergic to place. She writes about migrant experiences with the help of a tornado auntie, lion goddess, immortal witch, the occasional ghost, etc. Her work has recently been published in Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways, GigaNotoSaurus, Fantasy Magazine, and FIYAH Literary Magazine. It has also appeared in anthologies such as As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories and Africa Risen. You can find links to her works on her website: aline-mweziniyonsenga.com/ My Friend the Lord of the Forest Like her missing cousin had advised, Gabi focused on one thing over studying: making friends. This was easy. As soon as she landed in the grey iciness of a foreign autumn, in a flat city of sharp rectangular lines, Gabi joined the community association and attended its youth conference event. This was a good distraction from her cousin’s disappearance. She could pretend his messages from a month ago were sent just yesterday. Introduce yourself clearly. Enunciate. Ask people about themselves. They’ll immediately feel closer to you. People love to talk about themselves. Gabi had laughed at the advice. She had no trouble being social. Her cousin had pointed out that she had spent most of her life among family at home, among friends at school. She didn’t have enough practice with meeting new people—total strangers, her cousin had stressed. He had been the same before he studied abroad. He didn’t want her to make the same mistakes. “Channel your inner Lord of the Forest,” her cousin had said. “Strong. Confident. Like you rule over trees.” Gabi had laughed. Her cousin would always make silly references to his favourite made-up character: the Lord of the Forest, both beast and mighty king. Gabi didn’t understand her cousin’s admiration, but the silliness of the memory was a good distraction. At the youth conference, Gabi ignored her freezing wet flats and laughed with other smartly blazered young people. “We haven’t seen you before. Where are you from?” was the common refrain. Questions of location, high school, university flew across the room. Common points were highly sought after. Once found, shoulders loosened. Then a man leaned close to Gabi’s ear and said, “You’re Ingabire, right? I know your cousin, _____.” Ice rubbed down her neck. Her nametag said Gabi. Not once had she introduced herself in full. “Oh, really? My cousin?” She hadn’t told this man where she was from. Her brain struggled to place him as the nerves in her chest squirmed with wary confusion. He wasn’t in the family group chat. Her cousin’s name was no longer mentioned there because who knew who was watching. “Yes, I read his article,” the man said. He didn’t introduce himself. “I study information technology. Where do you study?” “I’m job hunting,” Gabi said, and waved at someone behind him. She made three rounds around the velvety room, feet burning. In the bathroom she sobbed with her fist in her mouth. She grabbed her coat and left. Outside, a warm wind surprised Gabi, followed by a fleeting shadow. A big dog running past, Gabi reasoned. A big, big dog. Strangest of all was the smell of wet soil that lingered. # After the conference encounter, Gabi spiraled. Normal guests would come to her aunt’s house, but their questions unnerved her. Who knew who was watching. “I’m sorry about your cousin,” one friend of a friend said. Gabi avoided further visits. She hibernated at school throughout the winter, morning to night, weekends at the library. She spoke to no one. Would they ask about her cousin? Would they watch her every move? Would they report back? Her cousin was still missing. Him and his obsession with the Lord of the Forest. Gabi’s cousin was obsessed with one umugani he heard in primary school: the story of Sebwugugu. It was about a foolish husband and the poor wife who bore with his foolishness until he got himself killed. A ferocious beast killed him, so his wife kept house with an axe in her hand, ready to kill it should it come back. One day someone did knock at her door, introducing himself as the Lord of the Forest. Go away, beast! the wife said. I know who you truly are. Gabi didn’t remember how her cousin described it, but the Lord of the Forest was able to show that he was a noble individual who ruled justly over the forest and its creatures. I cannot ignore a woman alone. I simply wished to see you well. He might have left her gifts or the help of ten enchanted ploughs to help her through her harvest, but eventually she trusted him as someone more dependable than her husband, and they married. At this point, Gabi would snort, “That’s not even the right version of the story. A beast killed her husband, yes, but then the woman killed it, and the chief of a nearby village found out and rewarded her for getting rid of something that had killed his people. She married the chief.” “I’m asking you to imagine,” her cousin would say. “Imagine if the chief and the beast were the same. Then the Lord of the Forest would be like a metaphor for protecting our trees.” Her cousin had studied environmental science. “Imagine if he was still around to protect forests today. There’d be less deforestation, less bandits and poachers hiding in there.” Her cousin had written an article—a personal essay, he called it—about the Lord of the Forest and forest conservation, the dangers of overdevelopment, all in an effort to promote an equal exchange with nature, and pay it respect. Five months had passed since Gabi’s cousin went missing. Four months since her arrival abroad. The snow thawed. Her aunt must have complained, because her mother was urging her to say hi to so-and-so, to meet with so-and-so’s daughter, to show her face at parties. To pretend everything was normal for who knows who is watching. So when Gabi saw a poster for a student club, she decided to join. # Gabi joined Sanctuary Club on a sunny Monday afternoon. A place where everyone is welcome. You can make friends, or you can enjoy silence together. Arts and crafts activities are provided. The sun was setting later and later every day, making Gabi wonder if one day it wouldn’t set at all. The colourful people of Sanctuary Club were even stranger, with their dyed hair and clinking bracelets, studying degrees her parents would never pay for her to study. Their club president was a taller-than-tall man named Murugo, who smelled like Vaseline and eucalyptus. For the first time in months, Gabi felt she was at home. Murugo played an RnB playlist mixed with amapiano and old songs from home, while the club crocheted or glued magazine clippings to pieces of construction paper. Gabi did not know how to crochet, so she picked up a pair of scissors and an old student magazine. Murugo sat across from her. Up close, she could smell wet soil. It reminded her of the southern bamboo forest back home, where it was said Ngunda fell. She thought of swaying bamboo shoots. She cut a whole background of them off the magazine and glued it onto a blue piece of paper. “Where are you from?” she asked Murugo. “Gisenyi. I came here a long time ago, in the 90s.” He didn’t look that much older than her. He must have been a baby. They skirted around the topic of genocide and spoke instead about school and what was missing on the playlist. Murugo was also studying environmental science. Maybe because Murugo grew up outside, Gabi felt safe to speak about her own two siblings, her extended family, but nothing about her missing cousin. An old poet crowed over the Bluetooth stereo. Gabi snorted. “You’re like a grandpa.” But the steady drumming and keening words made her eyes water. Her cousin loved this song. Murugo had no siblings. No parents. Gabi bit the inside of her cheek upon hearing it. At least her cousin was not dead. He couldn’t be. Her first piece of art was a forest of smiling faces, the words rest and family big across the middle. The word rest reminded her of death, so she ripped that part off the artwork, crumpled the whole thing, and threw it away. No one questioned this. # Murugo hummed while he worked, a habit that reminded Gabi of her cousin, and for a moment she felt safe in the knowledge that somewhere somehow her cousin was humming. He was safe. The club didn’t have an end time, but Gabi left before sunset. When she left the club room for the day, Murugo’s hum would carry into the hallway, following her all the way outside like a low buzzing in her eardrums. Her cousin was safe. He must be. # Once during club time, Murugo stretched his arms up and yawned. His shirt was cropped so Gabi saw the scar on his belly, like the bullet scar her grandfather had, and suddenly she could see the bullet holes under the kitchen window in her grandparents’ house. Her cousin’s article mentioned how her grandparents had never found out who was shooting. Was it bandits? The old regime? One thing was for sure: they had come from the north. The article could have had to do with his disappearance. That’s what her family thought. He had been on his way to renew his passport and didn’t come back. The article had to be the reason, but sometimes there are no reasons. Sometimes family just disappears, and the people who took them never tell you why. Tears welled up in Gabi’s eyes, dripping onto the words family, lost, and found. She left the clubroom. Murugo followed her. “I’m just going to the bathroom,” she said. “I know a good place to cry.” He led her up a set of stairs, and more stairs, until they reached a door that pushed onto a roof alive with whirring sounds. Fans spun at the corners of a verdant paradise of potted ferns that formed a square around a swinging bench adorned with vines. The air was warm like home. The plants were outstretched arms like home. Gabi’s tears fell like so much rain back home. Murugo pointed to the swinging bench and said he’d be right back. Gabi let herself sink into the bench’s plush cushions. She wrung her tears out, wailing just loud enough to blend with the chorus of fans and mechanical whirs surrounding the garden. It all became a hum of noise, steady like a lullaby. Gabi woke to a tap on her shoulder. Murugo handed her a wad of tissues and she blew her nose. She hugged a cushion while he watered the plants with a plastic can. He scratched his belly, where the scar was. “How did you get shot?” she asked. Murugo looked out at the pinking sky. It was almost sunset already. “Bandits.” Of course. “My cousin is missing.” Gabi bit the inside of her lip to steady it. “They want to hold a funeral for him.” It hadn’t been a year yet, but did his family want to wait that long? One year would be agony for them, unspeakable for him. Better to believe he was dead. It was eight months since his disappearance. Murugo wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and she leaned into him. As the sky blued, his arm warmed like fur. # “I remember the forest,” Murugo said. “It was vast back then. I’d climb the tallest tree and look out at everything. It smelled like damp leaves, like fresh oxygen, like soil. There were so many birds back then. And the mountain gorillas. They were many. I remember that white woman would be around them a lot. That was when the forest was smelling more and more like gunpowder, more like diesel. I heard more gunshots, people who didn’t belong running around. People fleeing.” Gabi tuned in around the mention of gunshots. “You remember all that?” He didn’t look older than thirty. He must have been a child. “I had to flee in the end.” Their silence skirted around war again, and the snip-snip of scissors carried them through the afternoon. Gabi glued a forest scene again. It had a monkey (she couldn’t find gorillas), birds, and a man with darker skin than Murugo. The only word she cut out was home. # Murugo announced he was travelling for a few months. The new club president was a pale girl with longish teeth. Good-bye was a brief hug and a promise to exchange song recommendations. Gabi swallowed her loneliness and redoubled her focus on her studies. One time she went up to the roof to cry, but the door was locked. Through the fogged-up window she saw grey shapes, like sleeping beasts in the gloom, and she remembered dozing on Murugo’s shoulder, how it had warmed like fur. “I promise you. Your cousin will be found,” he’d said. Gabi had chuckled. “You can’t promise that.” “I simply wish to see you well.” That day, Gabi left the clubroom after sunset. As she walked down the hall, noise exploded from the clubroom. Laughter morphed into barking. Shouts became howls. And there was a new smell, like wet soil, the same smell from the night at the youth conference, now coming from the room. Gabi walked away fast, following an instinct against trouble. The smell of wet soil lingered in her nostrils, following her all the way home. A shadow slipped under the streetlights. A big dog running past. A big, big dog. # Gabi ditched Sanctuary Club to form a study group with two people she met at a party her aunt dragged her to. They became fast friends. Their taste in music was fresh, not like Murugo’s grandpa's taste. She joked about this with her new friends. They teased her about how she might like him. The funeral was postponed. Gabi exhaled then remembered it didn’t mean her cousin was any less missing. She forgot how to inhale and spent the next few weeks relearning how. A second time she went up to the roof, but it was bare. The whirring came from generators, no fans, only a cold wind, reminding her of the day she first set foot on this strange country. It was supposed to be a new start, distance from her cousin’s disappearance, but the fact of his absence haunted her still. Her breath stuck in her throat and stayed there through winter. She holed up in library study rooms, this time with people she could laugh with. Her throat loosened just a little. A year and a half since her cousin went missing. She learned to breathe around the absence clogging her throat. A third time she went up to the roof to cry, but the door was locked. The window was too dirty to see through. It shone like the white haze of a winter storm. This time Gabi sank against the door. Was it even the right door? Had the verdant garden been a dream? Her phone vibrated. She ignored it. Ten missed calls passed from her mother. Gabi rubbed her eyes dry and called back, both wishing for and dreading the moment her mother picked up. “Gabi,” her mother sniffled. She didn’t like that tone. Gabi reached for the locked door behind her. She yanked on its handle, as if it might help her escape. “Is he dead?” Gabi asked. The lock clicked, a clear sound in the trembling silence. Gabi tumbled onto the roof. The white haze broke into golden sunlight over the verdant garden, alive again with potted ferns arranged in a square around its creaking swing. Vines wrapped around the swing, and Gabi pulled on one of its leaves as she sat on the swing’s cushions. The smell of wet soil filled her nostrils. “Your cousin is back,” her mother said. “Kasha is back.” Gabi’s throat loosened into a squeak. “Alive?” The sound of a hum grew deeper than the whirring fans. Gabi lowered her phone to listen, checking behind her. A fleeting shadow blinked past. A dog running. A big, big dog. “Gabi?” Her mother’s voice faintly bleated through her fingers. “Are you there?” Water poured from a plastic can, showering the ferns in the garden. Gabi did not have to see the face that did it. She knew who it truly was. “Murugo?” The air was wet soil, the smell of home. Her cousin was home, but the Lord of the Forest was not. ### 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.

residing in North Carolina with her family, she is currently editing her first novel and developing a poetry

Marchaé Grair (they/she) is a storyteller, spiritual seeker, and facilitator making meaning of life’s liminal spaces. They are an alum of residencies and workshops presented by Tin House, Anaphora Arts, Voices of our Nations (VONA), the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and Roots. Wounds. Words, where they were also a writer-in-residence. Marchaé’s work embodies their Black, queer, nonbinary, disabled, and polyamorous experiences. They are working on a queer, young adult romance novel loosely based on their life and other essays about identity. When they are not writing, they are rewatching their favorite rom-coms, downloading the new Sims expansion pack, or laughing a little too loudly at their own jokes. She/Not Her Before you fly, you always pack your clothing first because clothes take up almost all of your suitcase. After all, you are a Taurus Venus and never know when a surprise special occasion will call for sequins. And if forced to choose, you will stuff your suitcase with that just-in-case little black dress or those just-in-case little black briefs before you pack your migraine medicine or allergy pills. You stare at the edges of your carry-on suitcase as if they will magically expand, but the black zippered lining attaching the metallic blue, hard cover to the soft, gray inside doesn't budge. You remember the day you bought this carry-on from T.J. Maxx. You were in the middle of a travel spree; in January, you’d gone to Chicago to see one of your platonic loves, then driven to Montreal to vacation with your partner. Your last stop would be in the Dominican Republic to vacation with your long-distance lover. Your pregnant wife was traveling to California at the same time you were traveling to the Dominican Republic. You already felt bad enough for having needs, including needs that meant loving and fucking other people, so you certainly weren’t going to ask your wife if you could take the only household carry-on with four wheels. You both needed her to have that win. So you went to T.J. Maxx and walked around the suitcase section for fifty minutes. This was not the fancy, downtown, two-story T.J. Maxx that mesmerized you when you got lost years ago leaving your new job in downtown Boston. This was a reasonable T.J. Maxx in the Boston suburbs with a suitcase section so small that you missed it multiple times when you first scanned the store. Yet, it still took you almost an hour to browse through the carry-on suitcases because you didn’t know which one looked like it was made for someone like you. If this were the you who used to work downtown, you would have taken one look at the brown, faux-leather purse and carry-on hybrid bag in the corner and called it a night. Back then, you had a work wardrobe, and it was all discounted, from women’s department stores, and business casual. You were a young Bette Porter if she grew up in small-town Ohio and found her way East instead of West. You posted a now-hidden Instagram photo on your first day of work downtown in your favorite outfit: a black, form-fitting, Calvin Klein dress and a complementary Calvin Klein red and black blazer with pointed shoulders. Your hair was crocheted into long hair extensions that were worsening your then undiagnosed alopecia, but the braids made you feel beautiful. This version of you only showed up to work in an assortment of Fenty lipstick shades; Covid and gender confusion were years away, so you weren’t masking.  Present you hasn’t bought a purse in years, unless you count additions to your collection of tasteful   fanny packs. Past you decides against the faux leather purse and other carry-ons like it. Past you notices pastel Jessica Simpson carry-ons close by. You imagine yourself rolling pastel luggage behind you while wearing a hoodie, baggy jeans, and a t-shirt, and you shake your head. Your eyes land on a carry-on with a picture of a white businessman on the cardboard label of the branding. This carry-on is on a central display set apart from the other suitcases, so it must be special. You’re not exactly sure what your gender will be when you fly, but you know it won’t be white businessman. The other carry-ons to the left of the smiling white man whisper to you, “You don’t fly in first class, and you know you can’t even afford first class carry-ons at T.J. Maxx.” You’re unsure why these imaginary voices are so rude, but like most Bostonians, they are both rude and  correct, so you keep circling the suitcases. You stop in front of the metallic, ice-blue carry-on. You can see yourself wearing anything from sweatpants to a dress with this suitcase in tow. You know you will pack more feminine clothes this trip because you’re going to the Dominican Republic, an unfamiliar place, and unfamiliar places always bring out the woman in you. It’s not that you’re uncomfortable in women’s clothes; you especially love your summer dresses that are all cleavage on top and tradwife from the waist down. You just hate yourself a little bit for defaulting to ultra feminine clothes when you travel and need a shield—whether it‘s protection from men who are nicer to women they desire or protection from confused stares when people can’t quite guess if you’re a tomboy or a trans boi or a lesbian or a middle-aged Black woman trying to channel Billie Eilish.  You look at your phone and message your friend who you promised to visit after a quick trip to T.J. Maxx. You’re “coming, promise!” You think about a dinner you had with this friend years ago at a mediocre neighborhood bar and restaurant that is now a Life Alive. You’re glad it was still a bar then because you needed that tequila-based liquid courage with the pink salt rim to tell your friend you were using additional pronouns. You wished you could have also purchased liquid amnesia because your friend responded by saying nonbinary people were only in the cultural conversation because women weren't given enough room to be butch or more masculine. You said that wasn’t how it worked, then swallowed your tequila cocktail and your pride and changed the subject. You imagine yourself having more tequila-infused conversations about gender in the Dominican Republic, but this time, it would be with your lover who you met as a woman in 2010. She may still think of you that way since your body’s only gotten softer and rounder with time. She calls you beautiful, and you love it and believe her, but you wish she called you handsome sometimes, too, because your partner does that, and it makes you feel alive. You wonder if anyone who knew you fifteen years ago will ever think of you as the gender-bending switch you know yourself to be inside your head and beneath other people’s tangled sheets. You love your tender places, but you refuse to be reduced to those places alone just because you live in a Black, fat, soft body. The world expects you to mother it, but you’re not interested in your future child calling you mother, let alone being the whole world’s mammy. You understand your resistance to motherhood will be a one-way ticket to erasure in your child’s life; nurses and doctors already don’t acknowledge you during your wife’s prenatal care appointments because you’re not carrying the baby, and you’re not a man, so they don’t know what they should say to you, so they say nothing at all. You snap out of daydreaming about your future rejections because you are Black in a store with aggressive surveillance. The stacked video screens greeted you before anyone said hello. You’ve been at T.J. Maxx long enough for an extra “How may I help you?” to feel like a threat. You are a Sagittarius rising, so you text your friend that you’ll be on your way home soon, not knowing how soon, soon will be and grab the metallic blue carry-on off the shelf.  You pay $92.42 then fill the carry-on with your most feminine clothing for warm weather—a red one-piece you wore on Miami Beach when you wanted to look like a Baywatch lifeguard even though you can’t swim; a too-small red bikini top that hurts to snap but makes your boobs look less 40B and more 40C so you keep wearing it; black and white bikini bottoms that just cover the belly ring you should have stopped wearing 15 years ago; a blue jumpsuit with a deep dip at the chest that makes men do a double take that you are ashamed to admit you like; the jean shorts that are sexy when they’re sitting on your hips just right but more SNL-mom-jeans skit when they’re sitting all wrong; and some plain women’s tank tops because something has to be simple. You’re glad you won’t wear shoes at the beach because it’s one less thing to pack and one less way for you to be gendered. The last clothes you select for your trip are for the departure flight. You lay this outfit on the ratty gray comforter you won’t replace because you can only afford one new bed set, and you’re not sure what kind of bedding says you’re into sex but not as often as being non-monogamous might imply. Your airport travel outfit is always the same. A classic black and white Adidas tracksuit. You started wearing Adidas in high school, another time in your life you were hoping common brand names and neutral colors would make people treat you as less menacing. You hadn’t realized then that the leap from blending in to being invisible is less leap and more soul-crushing freefall. That every time you choose a jacket, or a shoe, or a lover, or an identity just to make someone else comfortable, you get farther away from yourself, and it isn’t that easy to find your way back. Even in your teens, your deepest desire was to be understood, and you learned the hard way that it’s impossible to be known when the mainstream paints your authentic existence as dangerous. People have always been too comfortable telling you all of the things they dislike about you without you asking. Too loud. Too opinionated. Too Black. Too scary. Wrong clothes. Wrong pronouns. Wrong body. You got tired of being told you were too much, so young, you learned how to make everything from your hair to your personality less big. You fried your scalp with sodium hydroxide for decades hoping to fit in, and in exchange, you got broken edges and a broken heart. Now, your natural hair is braided into old cornrows, so you pull a silk-lined, tan hat from a messy, plastic drawer by your bedroom door and lay it by your airport uniform. You grab a sports bra and tattered, pink, Victoria’s Secret underwear, the kind of underwear you never wear in the early days of a relationship because God forbid your lovers know you own granny panties. You would have chosen your gray, black, and white Tomboy briefs, but you remember the time a bulge in your sweats and the gathering of your briefs meant getting an extended pat down from TSA, and you refrain. You will wear your black and white Hokas with the Adidas sweatsuit because you’re a sometimes woman of a certain age, and your days of wearing shoes for style instead of function ended when you gained 50 pandemic pounds and got plantar fasciitis.  The last part of your travel wardrobe ritual is choosing your airport t-shirt. You open your overcrowded top dresser drawer and push aside all of the t-shirts reminding you who you are. The homemade Marxist shirt from your upstairs neighbor. The black Beyoncé concert t-shirt because you’re not fully anti-capitalist, especially if the dance floor is calling. The Boston Dyke March cutoffs you never wear in public because you’re unsure if word reclamation translates beyond those who do the reclaiming. The discolored t-shirt you bought in downtown Cleveland the day after the Cavs broke their championship losing streak and you realized you needed to break up with your abuser. The pink shirt with the wavy font listing all the reasons you believe in abolition. Your often foggy brain reaches for the Malcolm X quote that says something about the most disrespected person in America being the Black woman. You wonder what he would say about the Black trans person. You are no Malcolm X, but your existence is also threatening because your truths might make someone else want to be free. You choose a blue fitted Adidas top and start packing your toiletries.  ### 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. Click here to support Torch Literary Arts.

In 2022, they earned their MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Kentucky. Narrative Organizer for the Black Appalachian Coalition and as the Vice President of the Kentucky State Poetry

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.

Alisha S. Lockley is a poet, multimedia artist, stage director, and short film producer. Her work closely examines the subtle sensualities of the surreal and the spiritual. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Randolph College, and she was a finalist for the 2025 Furious Flower Prize judged by aracelis girmay. Unremarkable View of January from one window up above the maternity ward. Below, browning palms, a sherbet sunset; wind chopped Florida water froths filth. I’ve yet to see snow melt firsthand. I have an imagination that comes with new tremors here and there. Visiting hours in the behavioral unit are from 4 to 6. A fraction of my family sits outside glass doors I’m not allowed to touch. My beloveds wait to hold my hands. Nurses watch to scold what we forget while forgetting none of us are prisoners. First, my mother sees about me in her hot blue dress— reeking of altar fabric and Pompeii oil; My head swims against the third dose of Prozac. One pill for my father, one pill for someone’s else violent son– My mother lists the names of saints who ask about me. I’ve started worshipping alone. I’m a heathen because I believe in myself. My mother, more olive-branch-bearing-dove than bear, would rather send word than dirty herself with me in certain truths. Another patient is moved to shake her hand for how articulate I’ve “turned out.” I’m silent when left in solitude— He’s another one who can’t be bothered to read my mind, let alone the room. And before you ask, yes, he was. ### 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.

Moving between features, interviews, and cultural commentary, her storytelling holds a magnifying glass

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 .