Ghost

2024

Issue 17

Nala Washington

I heard once that Halloween is the time to get really creative.

Martina Adams used injections to change her skin color and claims her children will come out Black and that she? Has always been black. 

My ghost screams. 

'Tis the season of scary things,

Costumes this year should be no different than all year round,

Kim K rises once again from her white haven and turns dark. 

I know you saw her Met Gala ensemble, she got it after me. 

My skin lays across the table, harvested as decoration,

Fresh off my body, blood dripping, the category is: "horror.” 

Still in shape, ready to be worn, spooky.

She plucked with the tips of her fingers, pops her limbs in place of mine, she has taken over the wrong home, call me "haunted house.” 

Skin smooths over her bones, pose.

She laughs. “Boo.”

She thinks she wears it better than I do, pose.

Cut to the girl voguing over bent limbs, arching the back she forced herself into. 

Nikita Dragun decides "What race am I going to be today?” 

And the party praises her and her blackface renovation,

It's her holiday.

On her, my skin, is a new idea. 

They like the Blackness better as a garment than alive, 

They don't miss who the skin belongs to.

My skin, 

Is in season. 

And this is how the Black girl goes ghost.


Nala Washington (she/her) is in the graduating class of 2024 majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in Women and Gender Studies. She is the author of the chapbook “These False Parts” published with Gilded Lily Press. She has been published in the 2022 and 2023 issues of RiverCraft magazine for her poems “Thoughts on Dating Someone with a Kia” and “Call the Mortician.” She has previously written for the Good Girl Movement blog, competed in the Brave New Voices competition for the D.C. team in 2020, and was a featured performer at the Kennedy Center in 2020 for the Arts Across America Series. She has received the Janet Weis Literary Excellence Prize awarded by the Susquehanna University Creative Writing Department and the 2022 Erik Kirkland Memorial Prize for Creative Non-fiction awarded by Essay Magazine for her non-fiction piece, “Unfinished Letters.”


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