Sympathy Psalm

By Naa Asheley Ashitey

the sirens sing in crisp harmony                      

       as the procession line moves through the street.

The streetcar tracks vibrate in tune with the falsetto.

Urgently, the sweat in the cracks of my palm evaporates.

The crushing weight of yesteryear and tomorrow       

                        converges on the new sidewalk                                   

at the intersection of 7th and market.

 I recall the silence.                                                                   Grace lives in the cracks of my palms.

The sweat

  traverses

along

the lymphatics

in line

with the hemoglobin,

taking in and spitting out oxygen.

 the sirens sang in crisp harmony,

now the cries of regrets are all that echoes through the streets

 and the smell of sex                                                                               dissipates across the horizon.

 I wish for something better     

  and pray to

dilute the bad.

Author 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, BULL 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

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