Naa Asheley Ashitey

Poetry, Academic probation

I feel my light being
                                                   choked out.
A microliter of bile didn’t quench itself correctly
And thus,                                   parched the wick instead.
The lower esophageal sphincter                                                             has collapsed,
And the burn travels up my larynx
Before the contents                                                          find freedom
along the sides of my mouth and the white carpet floor.
 

I can hear the boots;
I know what’s next.

The tears do not fall.

The smell does not even get a chance
to permeate my olfactory as
I lick it up back up.

I’d rather save myself from the humiliation.

Bio: 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 The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, The San Antonio Review, BULLand 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