Deathbed Confessions

by NAA ASHELEY ASHITEY
in Spring 2026

Neville Barbour II, “Salt,” 2023

Deathbed confessions

Take this breath that I own
and break it into its atomic components,

rearrange it and feed it back to me.
Give me the experience of a

love that is uniquely crafted
to kiss all my wrinkles

so that when it is time for
me to become a supernova,

the remaining dust from
my collapse can still nourish

the other stars in that part of the sky
where our story began

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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