BREAKING BREAD | Gabriele Micozzi

After her father died,
she could not eat bread.
Not hunger.
Bread remembered too much.

It smelled of breakfasts
they had never called sacred:
knives beside butter,
crumbs on a table
where nobody said love
because love was the table.
For months, every loaf
was a body wrapped in paper;
every crust, his brown hand
breaking silence into pieces.

She bought milk, apples,
things with no ghosts.
But bread waited in shop windows,
white as hospital sheets,
warm as a voice
that no longer had lungs.

One morning rain scratched the glass.
She bought one small loaf
and carried it home
like an organ for transplant.
At the table she tore it open.
Steam rose.
Memory bit first.
She ate crying:
salt on her chin,
grief under her nails.

The bread did not bring him back.
It taught her something worse
and kinder:
the dead do not leave the body.
They become taste.
They become hand.
They become the mouth
learning again
how to stay in the world.

Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian writer, poet, professor and consultant. His literary work explores body, language, power, vulnerability, desire, illness, healing and what he calls “literary biodiversity”: the coexistence of poetry, prose, theater, science and embodied experience. His work can be found in The Literary Hatchet, 3Elements Review, ONE ART, Cathexis Northwest Press, Little Old Lady Comedy and Kaidankai Podcast; his poems have also been shortlisted by parABnormal Magazine. In Italy, his work has been published by FrancoAngeli and Dario Flaccovio as well as Attraverso Edizioni and TransEuropa Edizioni.

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