by Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey
The record finally scratched after 162 hours
There are some lyrics that end up freely dancing
In the darkness.
Each step that I take along the tiled hallway,
My eyes become filled with images of
My mother’s favorite psalms.
I scan those words so quickly,
Trembling thinking
about quickly her voice faded
When I started the third chemo session.
Is it all going to waste?
God, you must tell me,
Do you hear my heartbreak?
Can you promise me that the alarms
will stay on silent for tonight?
Because my body remembers it all,
And seeks to unlearn new formed habits
Of flinching at the warmth of sunrise
Because I think it’s you touching me and not him.
I am afraid.
I want to stay here.
Can you at least
do me a favor
and tell me
What lies ahead?
I’ve been here long enough to
see the crescent in the sky
go through a fifth cycle.
Let me live a few more hours that
I will witness the
sixth one in my own bed.
I don’t mind if the phantom has
To watch beside me.
I’ll tuck it in and kiss her goodnight
The same way my mother would.
Withdrawals
I still find myself thinking about the day
We decided to drink from the old,
silver fountain in the center of town.
I used to think that I wasn’t worthy of throwing
a penny into that silver tub,
but in the dead of night,
our bodies covered by a late May fog,
we laid together in her endless ocean and reaped the blessings from the
pennies and dimes that sunk to the bottom and occasionally stuck to our thighs.
A few cars drove on those half-paved roads,
whose tires helped create little ripples in the water.
Once those ripples stilled,
we were left to dance in the silence of the night,
Holding each other’s hands as we let the
fountain’s water baptize us as we worked to create new life in the dark,
While the foundations of the earth crumble behind us.
Dreamscapes
I want a love that simply has an ending.
Not one where the knife is removed from my abdomen.
Where a funeral is only freeing in body,
As separation now bows a new title that will remain with me,
despite all the new roads I am bound to travel to.
Something even less than the Sopranos,
Or the ending of a chapter.
Just give me an ending
And a new beginning that lives independently.
Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.
Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Hobart, The Brussels Review, JAKE, and in editorials for The Xylom and MedPage Today.
More at NaaAshitey.com
Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social