The last place I saw 
your name above ground

was in the Sunday obituaries.
I stared at weathered ink 

of em-dashes and slashes 
that explained the correct way to say

Your last name 
that anyone who reads it 

will likely not get it right; 
They were never trained on how to 

relax their bottom lip to get the accent right,
or how long they are supposed to let the “O” roll. 

They’ll especially never know the way you’d 
blow smoke on my face

When I breathed your name 
out in the way you used to make fun of me for,

Even though it was the mantra that always 
got you finish.

Grandma told me that death is never really an ending.
When the fog clears from the shower head,

The lessons from our “love”
That are forever etched 

along my bottom left triceps
Becomes visible on the 

long side of the silver tap.  
I’ve become accustomed 

to finding you living 
in the final stretches 

of ink in my pens and
The margins of a book. 

Today, you live in the newspaper. 
In forty years, I’ll run into you

At the park, and in a few days
When I close my eyes in a mid-work nap.

There is a blood drive at the library, 
And I know I’ll see you again 

When the needle passes through 
The dermis of the right inner bend of my elbow.

But this isn’t the result of 
the body keeping score.

/

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, The Cincinnati Review, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction and a finalist for the Claire Keyes Poetry Award. More at NaaAshitey.com.
 Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social