A POEM by NAA ASHELEY ASHITEY
“I look like my mother now”
in honor of Chen Chen especially in the photo we took the day after
she called to tell me about
the long line at Old World Market
& how she opened a yam on the counter
& found one where its center was rotten
& two others so ripe, they smelled rotten.
There is a version of this conversation
where I am braver and tell her: Mom, I love him
& yet I think we hit the end of the road
& I hate how happy must you now be,
but that I guess maybe you were right
& you saw how bad he probably was this whole time
but Mommy, he isn’t bad, just human & sensitive
& I am the real problem because you left me home at eight
so I cannot understand why he gets upset when I need to be alone
or he does not know how to handle being alone,
& I turned out fine & functional & apathetic & fuckable;
But instead, I ask what time Dad came home
& if she took her pills on time.
She ignores the second question
& starts complaining about hot it is outside.
I listen, & thankfully, it seems that the rain missed her apartment
and currently lives in mine;
her phone can’t handle water damage.
Naa Asheley Ashitey (She/her/hers) is a Chicago-born writer, a Doctors for America Copello Health Advocacy Fellow 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 work appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Brittle Paper and her editorials in Live Science, The Scientist, MedPage Today and more. She has been nominated for multiple awards and is working on her first poetry collection. More at NaaAshitey.com. Twitter/Instagram.