THREE NOTES | Gabriele Micozzi

Music does not enter through the ears.
It enters through bone.

It climbs the wrists,
ignites the hips,
drags the heart out of its locked room.

In the ward, my mother has been stone
for two years.

No faces.
No names.
No weather inside her eyes.

My sister lowers an old record
onto the turntable —
the song our mother used to sing
while the sauce burned sweet
and noon leaned over the kitchen.

Three notes.

And the dead room opens its mouth.

Not the whole song.
Not the whole woman.
But the chorus returns
like a match struck under water.

Her lips move.
Her fingers remember air.
For twelve seconds
the illness loses its badge.

The nurse stops at the door.
My sister forgets to breathe.
My mother sings
from the last lit window
of a brain going dark.

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.

PRINT