Hear this:
A woman at the bus stop has a gun in her brassiere/ the light turns red and/ a grandmother dreams of Zion-high/ a schoolgirl sucks salt-water tears/ pigeons pick mold from a piece of dry bread/ green mangoes fall before they can ripe/ sorry, no jobs/ the baby’s milk spoils in the hot sun/ the clouds over Kingston heavy with cares-of-life tears/ public works on strike/ weevils in the flour/ an eviction notice nailed to the door/ rotten chicken-back in the market/ sorry, no job/ the children’s coffins are made of pine/ sorry, no/ the goat tied to the ackee tree cannot bleat/ sorry. The people are vexed with sufferation. Their tears smell like kerosene; soon Kingston will catch fiah.

Marcia Douglas, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: a Novel in Bass Riddim, New Directions Publishing, 2018.

I was fully rooted in Jamaican identity when I arrived, at eighteen, in Miami en route to Newark, New Jersey. I had a three-week visa to visit my sister. I also had a jar of peeled Bombay mangoes from the tree in our yard, and ten US dollars wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. A Jamaican teenager with a three-week visa and very little money was apparently cause for suspicion. In Miami, I was stopped for questioning and brought to a separate office in the airport. The officer emptied my purse and looked through all of my belongings. He unwrapped my ten dollars from the toilet paper. He also opened the letter my mother had written to my sister, which, unbeknown to me, urged her to keep me in the US and not send me back. She thought I would do better there. But staying past my visa would make me an “illegal alien.” The officer read the letter. Then he held up the little book of daily devotions my mother had also given to me. He said, “I have one of these too, but unlike you, I live by it.”

Marcia Douglas, “Becoming the Girl in the Ring,” The New York Review of Books, April 2018.