Five Poems

by Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey

If this poem were to hang in a museum, I pray it is because people truly read between the lines

I too find it difficult to want to fight in this moment.

I too, scoff at women who travel to the capital, dressed in Handmaids red in an act of protest

of the rights they were willing to sacrifice,

so that they could return to calling us slurs.

When they throw red paint on the steps of the capital,

Or lie flat on their back in silence at the door of the high court,

I tear up thinking about the Black bodies that were forced to bleed for the creation of these steps,

And whose bodies became part of the mold for these monuments.

Handmaids’ women, if you want your message to be authentic,

Take a sledgehammer to the cement.

Break it deep enough and you too will see the blood that was painted over millions of times.

There, you should get on your knees, scream and cry for change,

And repent what you were willing to lose so that the history behind these

Blood-ridden steps would be forgotten.

There, you will revoke the eternal sin of the separatism of gender

in the name of whiteness.

You will pray and ask for forgiveness for falling for fallacy

that the patriarchy’s fight to maintain the status quo

would make you all the exception. 

You will preach and take one last breath to scream “nevermore!”

Then, you will walk back to your towns and homes,

And at that next work meeting, you will stay silent and listen to our pleas.

At the next women’s march, you will wear pussy hats with pink, black and purple hues,

incomplete vaginal canals and undecorated scrotums,

and you will repeat our words without paraphrase or ego.

You will burn those white bonnets, and realize you can no longer wait for others to create

Utopia. You too, must truly bleed with the rest of us.

That is how we will survive. 

to: Black women who have never known a life free from the burden of defending your skin and having to reclaim your femininity

I understand why some of you have resorted to using the same vernacular of the other side.  

The moment you were birthed into this world, your first enemy might’ve been your caretaker.

If you’re lucky enough, you may have been spared from the

irrational cruelty towards your melanin for a few years,

until you hopscotch over the faded chalk on the concrete,

and take your first step on the tile or carpet floor that marks the start of your education—

that might be where the hate begins.

You stopped believing in the terms “melanin blessed” or “sun kissed.”

You have likely been betrayed by those who share our socialized construct and have unfortunately been programmed to believe our tone is the lowest of them all.

I understand that you’re just trying to find safety.

Trying to defend yourself because you believe that no one will.

I know that when you step into the shower, the soap bubbles that travel along the creases of your labia—something some people believe women of our tone do not naturally possess—will be washed away by your own tears.

You are a woman, despite what your white coworkers think,

despite ignorant men who use steroids to achieve your natural muscle tone.

You are a woman, and I know that you are tired of having to fight against

those who believe that dark-skinned women, could not actually be “real women.”

I know you don’t mean to be hateful to the dolls. 

You do not mean to be ignorant to the journey our fellow sisters have had to traverse.  

You understand the ostracization that they feel,

as you personally are battling to find any community that will take you whole.

And yes, maybe there are some who have also ostracized you:

That despite their marginalization, their solution to be validated is to echo

the same slurs used against us and embrace the falsehood of supremacy.

They will learn, and some of them won’t.

But we must stand and embrace our sisters who have found a home

in the identity shared between us.

I understand that this might be difficult and that you may think I’m asking you to put

our pain to the side once more: that is not the case.

Defend the melanin that covers your face, your arms, your labia and your clit.

But in doing so, do not sacrifice our sisters by adopting the phrases of those who still do not see us as human, as a means to defend our womanhood

Do not give into the fallacy that equivocates sex and gender.

I refuse for Black women to be the reason another qualifier has to be added behind “feminism.”

This is America

What will happen when the floods return?

When the ocean splits in half and he walks his path, but decides to not

Sacrifice thyself at the end?

When he makes it to his destination, but does not even dare to turn back at us,

And instead walk up those stairs to his father and shuts the door behind him.

What happens when we are no longer permitted to speak to God, nor evoke his almighty.

When “God” no longer has any meaning,

What will you tell us now?

What will you tell us to do when we are once again

forced to stare into the barrel of an AK?

Choose the title that will make you all willing to finally recognize the dangerous road we have paved in the past six years:

I now scoff at all the people that continue to ask, “why didn’t they just reach out?” or therapy talk is driving your best friends to suicide faster than reading twitter for an hour

/Can we meet in the park at 5 and sit in silence, and you say nothing as I cry? / / Would it be okay for you to sing me my favorite lullaby of you sipping the last third of the iced coffee you bought me? / When the grief reaches capacity once more, can I text you to /stop me from jumping off of my roof /without having to /preface my feelings/ with “hey, do you have the emotional capacity to just listen to me rant and share emotions that I wish upon no one; I don’t mean to be so emotionally burdensome as a friend, I’m reaching out and not hiding anymore because you have always  /created a space/ to allow me to feel safe to process the thoughts the wellbutrin didn’t want to suppress today lol / but no seriously like I’m just like,  /I’m so sorry/ if it seems that I am trying to take advantage of that/. However, if things are currently too much, I promise I’ll be fine. I just need to talk with someone, but I think /I can just wait /until my therapy session on /Monday/.”

A list of the more notable mean things that were said to me in the first 25 years of my life

Probably something about my thighs and that I’m going to be fat like my aunties

Probably something about my hair gaining tighter coils than loose curls

Probably something about hoping my skin would stay the color it is

I snore louder than my dad and it scares my parents

That I’m ugly

“How did I end up being so ugly since my sister is so pretty?”

When some of the girls threw me to the ground for breaking the tip of a crayon, and screamed in my face that I was worthless

“Oh no, the lights are off, where did the demon go”

“Your parents should’ve aborted you” [the year of my 1st attempt, the year I missed school the most, the year my best friend would leave my school, and I was back to fighting on my own;]

“No one will ever love you” [the year my parents’ marriage seemed that it was going to collapse; the year my mother told me the only reason why she didn’t jump in front of the tracks was because of me]

My classmates being mad that I was still alive, I was ugly, a stupid dark-skinned bitch [the year my relationship with my dad further collapsed—we didn’t talk for a few months]

Being called an ugly, stupid, worthless bitch; poor girl; just because I’m low income that doesn’t mean I can’t dress [my 1st grade teacher told my parents to stop dressing me nice to school because maybe my classmates would stop bullying me, so I didn’t have control of my clothing or a sense of my personal style for a long time]

“Girls like you get raped” [the last time I cried at that school]

“Oh no, the lights are off, quick shine your teeth so we can see” [the point at which I began to roll my eyes and try to laugh at the “jokes”]

“You’re not that smart since you find AP Stats difficult”; “What a slut” [my personal favorite quote from one of the tutors from my college prep after school program who was a PhD student; A PhD  student who was somehow “threatened” by a 15 year old girl who had only learned what a hand job was a few months prior and that my curves that began to become more noticeable was simply just the way my body was and I was not trying to “show off”, it was simply my body; She was also upset that I was smart enough to pass her class and bragged to the seniors in this afterschool program who never liked me that she was so happy I failed my quiz]

That I don’t need to use big words to try so hard to sound smarter than I am [but I already know that I’m not smart]

“Do you really think that you’re smart enough to apply to Princeton? [redacted] I’m pretty sure has a higher GPA and ACT score than you and they still might have trouble getting in”; “Picture of a Gorilla, ACT of 0, gets into Harvard”; “damn, who did you fuck to get into uchicago?”;  “whose dick did you suck to get into college?”; they only accepted you because of affirmative action [yes, this was the year he was elected]

“Whose dick did you suck to get into college?”; “Did you even go to high school?”; “Maybe you should’ve been smarter.” [The first time I went to therapy after I was getting very close to attempting again; I was also SA three times that year]

“How did my face get so dirty when I used to be so beautiful as a child?”

Die [insert racial slur], Die [insert racial slur], Die [insert racial slur]

[insert racial slur]; my entire student government experience [getting threats of SA on an anonymous thread and being mocked in an exhibitionist manner for something I did not do by graduate students was the cherry on top]

“If you keep gaining weight, you’re going to continue to be ugly”

“You being delayed pushes back people’s actual valuable science” [went on Zoloft for a few months as we got close to attempt #3 here]

That I am not as valuable as I think I am

That everyone thinks I use big words to try to sound like I’m smarter than everyone else 

I’m almost excited to see what awaits me next.

This is too much to endure in one lifetime, let

alone in the first quarter of mine

BIO: Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey (She/Her/Hers) is a Chicago-born writer and an MD-PhD Student at UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is interested in the intersection between scientific research, medicine and the humanities. Her works have been published or forthcoming in Broken Antler Magazine, JAKE, The B’K Magazine, Abstract Magazine, Okay Donkey and more. More at NaaAshitey.com

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