Three Poems by Naa Asheley Ashitey

These three poems by Naa Asheley Ashitey focus on what we start to notice — or miss — as things come to an end, and what we hope will change when the end arrives…

by:  Naa Asheley Ashitey

Daily routine 

The sun did technically rise this morning.
A semblance of light did bleed through
My blinds sometime between 6 and 7am, as 
I felt a small warmth trickle along the bottoms of my 
Eyelids that triggered my feet to move from
It’s resting place and to the floor of my bedroom.
I did open the door connecting my room to the bathroom,
And let the artificial LED illuminate my skin to 
Complete all the normal things one does in the morning.
Yet, when I walked back into the room, 
The light that prompted me to begin
This morning routine, 
Seemed to have completely disappeared as if 
It was never there in the first place. 
The room looked like how it did 
When I closed my eyes just hours ago
After I cried myself to sleep 
because I got a stupid paper cut
after we told each other
we love each other for the last time,
and the phone line clicked off. 

So am I, Langston. 

I want to live a day where I don’t crave
To find evidence that there is good on this plane,
I have so long loved the words of Langston and 
the hope of searching for live and peace benefit the concrete and soils we walk on. 
But I still find myself sobbing on my bathroom floor 
when my dad still tells me that I need to remember 
that no matter how smart [he thinks] I am, 
how hard I work and how brilliant [he thinks] I can be, 
because I’m a Black woman, 
[I too, must take a knife and smile at innocent worms and bugs in the rind*]
The world [my classmates] will always push to make me be nothing.  

*Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York :Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1994.

The agreements I didn’t write into the will 
 
I want you to know that when you take that final breath, 
I will wrap your favorite green blanket across your chest 
and rub your back the way it always allowed you to fall into a peaceful slumber. 
 
Even though you won’t wake up to tell me about the dream you had, 
I’m still going to turn my head, look at the spot of the bed 
where the one strand of hair you always never cut quite right in the mirror would lay 
and smile. 
 
Even though this bed will now only contain one heartbeat, 
I promise that your side of the bed will still be on your favorite sleep number setting 
for those days that you get sick of how soft your new bed is, 
and want to go back to your sleeping on 
your firm mattress that created 
that small indent 
on the side of your ribcage
that I will forever tease you about.
 
I should probably warn you 
that that the room might look different 
from time to time. 
I might use the brown bedsheets a little bit past the winter. 
I’ll probably end up moving the mirror 
to the other side of the room, next to my dresser, 
so I don’t have to wake up and remember how big this bed is for one person. 
 
And I know you said that I should try and move on,
and to not be scared to have the shape of someone else’s lips inscribed to memory. 
Truthfully, I fear the day that I’ll know that someone other than you 
Just got back from the climbing gym an hour ago
when I hold their hand and feel the fresh calluses forming. 
 
Frankly, I don’t know when 
or if I’ll ever be able to let you go. 
 
But if I somehow do, 
I won’t be scared to pick up the necklace you bought for me 
the night you said you loved me, 
and wear it on a late night out 
on a date where we decided to try out a new bar, 
get a bit to tipsy, and I find myself collapsing on the side walking
unable to stop laughing at her inability to jaywalk 
between the row of taxi drivers 
honking in synchrony on State Street. 
And maybe, I finally take out your favorite teddy bear 
from that corner in my closet 
and sleep with it a few nights of the week, 
while cuddling with that new friend 
who somehow also enjoys a firm mattress over a soft one. 
 
I’ll never get the hype, 
but that’s okay.

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 creative work appears or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, BULL, Hobart, Michigan City Review of Books, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction. More at NaaAshitey.com.

Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social