Dave White’s Ghost Ship (July 1, 2024) and Kiana Jimenez’s poem Night Ritual intertwine in a haunting dialogue between visual art and verse, both exploring the inevitability of death and the solitude that follows. Together, they summon an atmosphere of dread, mourning, and the unrelenting presence of the unknown.

The illustration captures a spectral vessel adrift on a darkened sea. Its sails hang heavy like memories, and its skeletal figurehead reminds us of the inescapable face of mortality. The waters shimmer with a deceptive calm, glowing faintly as though whispering the secrets of the drowned. With no crew aboard, the ship becomes a ghost itself—carrying only silence, memory, and stories that will never again be told.

In Night Ritual, the poem mirrors this haunting solitude. Storm clouds gather, pressing down with the weight of dread. Death looms, striking the soul with inevitability. The narrator stands stripped and vulnerable before the final judgment, begging for forgiveness, only to find themselves swallowed by the darkness of doom.

“My dread grows as the stroke of death falls against my naked soul.”

Both poem and illustration exist in a liminal space—where the living and the dead collide, where fear becomes both ritual and reality. The Ghost Ship drifts without destination, embodying the same sense of isolation that the poem confronts: a soul suspended in fear, grief, and inevitability.

Together, they remind us of the rituals we perform in the face of despair, the echoes of fear that follow us across seas of memory. The ship sails on, just as the soul lingers—haunted, weightless, and tethered to the shadows.