The Original Sin – Harpy Hybrid Review

The Original Sin, pt. 1

Rather than let her tongue run dry,
which would likely upset man 
when he requests for her mouth 

To be used to swallow down his praise, 
she quenched her throat from the bite,
allowing the juices of the apple to coat her tongue.

Her eyes rolled, fighting to keep the tears
released from her lacrimal glands to never 
go past the corner of her eyes. 

We were taught that the first sin was consumption,
so, I will not make the same mistake as Eve.
I will ensure that my spit is enough 

to keep my mouth occupied, 
and my hunger suppressed.

The Original Sin, pt. 2

as if hunger was a trait that we learn, 
	become conditioned to treat as a want rather than 
	a basic need that should have never 
	been transformed into something we now must earn.   
as if thirst was not an innate trait,
	and the receptors signaling us to 
	Consume share a closer likeness to stevia 
	than pure cane sugar that started wars 
	that ended generations before their wealth of knowledge 
	Could be passed down and inherited to forefathers and sons.  
as if wanting was blasphemous,
	a crime deserving of 100 life sentences, 
	And desire was sacrilegious,
	even if its roots were placed in my hands 
	before I ever chose to reach.

Naa Asheley Ashitey

Three Questions for Naa

What inspired your choice of genre(s) and/or form(s) for your work?

I have been working on a chapbook that I hope will come out later this year or maybe next year (all depends on how contests and queries go) that focuses a lot on using religion/religious imagery to talk about becoming in a very broad sense. I think I am very fortunate to have not had any severe religious trauma but I have certainly found myself finding some disillusionment with it. I think religion has been a way for me to explore my relationship with sex and intimacy, as well as grief for the world that I found myself born into. The pieces are very much free verse and much of "Is there anything left to offer?" was heavily inspired by people like Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine and andriniki mattis. I think each of them finds a way to use space to tell a story and for that poem and honestly, so many poems I've written since, I've been really interested in seeing how shape/space can further emphasize the words on the page and give greater power to them.

What was your creative process?

Poetry is a very different creative process to me. My degree is in creative writing with a specialization in fiction. With fiction, there is a lot more "intention" to it. That is not to say I don't put in work in my poetry, but in fiction, I find myself having to really sit down, create a whole outline, write the ending of the piece first and work my way back. With poetry, something about the freedomness of it allows it to just naturally flow. Since I never formally learned poetry as much as I wish I had, I've bought probably about 50+ different collections over the past year and have taught myself how to become a poet. Reading different collections has shown me styles I like, styles I don't really like but I want to try out, older poetic styles with contemporary twists that have made me go back to drafts of poems I have and try to change them up. Oftentimes, a poem starts because I see a particular word or phrase while reading an article, a tweet, a collection and in the span of five minutes on my phone or laptop, I craft a world around it. This can get a bit problematic when I'm in my lab and I need to be focusing on counting my cells and not writing (oops), so I do my best to kind of keep repeating that word or phrase in my head till I can get to something I can write down. Sometimes, I don't have an idea of where I want to take a poem but at the very least, that word or phrase will be written in my notes and in due time, i'll come back to it, let myself stare at the screen for a bit before my fingers take over and something starts to get drafted.

What is the significance of this work to you?

Over the past year, I have seen my writing change drastically. I was reorganizing my website the other day and I looked back at old pieces I have published and while I was proud of those pieces at the time (I still am), I almost want to cringe at some of them (lol). Mainly because pieces like these two show how much I've grown and matured as a writer, and how I've found my voice. It's a reminder to me that everyone starts somewhere and maybe in a few years, hell, in a few months, I'll look back at these pieces and think about what I would change with them, what I'd do differently, words I'd add or remove. But honestly, these were pieces I wrote and I remember coming back to them, especially as a sea of rejections was flooding my inbox, as a reminder of how much I've grown as a writer and I'm just honestly so proud of myself. I don't always give myself credit or say that, so I'm glad that these pieces have allowed me to do that.

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.