And suddenly, everything comes to a short pause.
It approaches a full stop, but the gear remains in drive
And the foot has not lifted from the pedal.
In that time, I counted many regrets
Through perforated memories
Wrapped in a double helix—
though this one is absent of
those nitrogenous bases.
As it slowly unzips itself,
a few pieces end up dissolving into the road.
The front-end tires make contact first.
I accept that
this is how God has chosen to answer my question.
I pull the anchor out,
And the car moves through the empty intersection.
about the author
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