Marlene S Devose

Poinsettia Marlene S Devose

Leemi Carmichael is a young African-American girl who was raised in Philadelphia. Leemi struggles with mental illness and tries to handle it on her own for a decade. As she searches for a cure, she gets a strong desire for love and belongingness and reaches out for the help of three individuals who she created with her very own imagination. She calls them "The Perfect Woman," "The Guard," and something she cannot quite identify but calls "The Presence. "When Leemi's symptoms worsen, she begins to lose faith and to question her existence. She still trusts the three entities from her imagination, but their plan for Leemi is not what she believes it to be. In her early adulthood, she finally gets treatment and gains a sense of belonging through friendship. She returns to her childhood home when treatment is complete and fights against an inevitable and gruesome relapse. One evening, she goes into her backyard to reminisce about her childhood and spots a poinsettia that oddly grew on a wall of vines when she was a child. She's always known the poinsettia was there but never believed that the clues to her cure were behind it all along. This time, she picks the poinsettia off the wall to see what she would find.