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ATTENDING TO THE QUIET:

A Reading of Gabriele Micozzi’s “Inventory of the Grandmothers Who Stayed”

To explore or download the free PDF document, click on the title above.

Click HERE to read the Micozzi poem “Inventory of the Grandmothers Who Stayed.”

A VILLAGE DOES NOT DISAPPEAR ALL AT ONCE. It thins through departures, empty rooms, inherited keys, and the ordinary habits of those who remain long enough to remember what has been lost. Gabriele Micozzi’s poem begins from this ground-level reality, attending not to rural life as a picturesque backdrop but to place as a lived archive of labor, weather, kinship, worship, and exile. Set on Via della Fonte, a fading rural artery in post-industrial Italy, the poem records the human cost of spopolamento (rural depopulation) without reducing that cost to mere social history and contemporary demographics. Instead, Micozzi builds meaning patiently from the line level upward, showing how memory behaves when a community faces absolute erasure.

That patience is evident from the first two lines, where the poem begins with a stark, quantitative ledger entry: “There are five grandmothers left / on Via della Fonte.” By isolating the specific number and the exact street name, the opening acts as a terminal census. The lines are short, clean, and declarative, demanding that the reader look at a fraction of a remaining community before any emotional or poetic interpretation can occur.

The second stanza then turns that census into a liturgy of local history, using parallel syntax to measure what remains in memory:

One remembers the name of every cow.
One remembers the year the snow reached the windows.
One remembers the priest before the priest before this priest.
One has forgotten her son
but not the road he took.

The repetition of “One remembers” forms an incantatory weight, equating agricultural memory, weather patterns, and generational clerical time. This rhythmic predictability shatters in the final two lines. The cognitive loss of the fourth grandmother—forgetting her own flesh but remembering the geographic vector of his departure (“the road he took”)—shifts the poem’s attention from local history to familial trauma. The sharp lineation after “son” visually and structurally isolates her loss, emphasizing that migration breaks not just lineage, but the heart as well.

From this intimate fracture, the poem widens into the acoustic atmosphere of the village itself. Micozzi’s diction remains exceptionally sparse, dominated by hard, monosyllabic nouns: key, road, sold, cats, bells. This linguistic compression mirrors the material austerity of a vanishing village. In the third and fourth stanzas, the poem confronts the sensory reality of abandonment:

and say how silent everything is.

Silent.
As if the place had chosen it.

By isolating the single word “Silent” as a line and a sentence unto itself, the poem forces a physical pause. This interruption mimics the acoustic vacuum encountered by the summer tourists (“strangers / who come in August”) who treat the empty village as a temporary curiosity.

The line “As if the place had chosen it” introduces a critical moral friction. The speculative phrase “As if” actively complicates the romanticized, pastoral mythologies built by visitors. The silence on Via della Fonte is not a voluntary, idyllic retreat into nature; it is a structural wound left by systemic neglect and the mandatory exile of its youth. The poem’s next image gives that wound a visible form.

When the grandmothers appear again, their stillness becomes both domestic and political:

They sit in the doorway
with their black dresses folded around them
like burned flags.

By comparing the grandmothers’ traditional morning garments to “burned flags,” Micozzi suggests the collapse of a larger social contract between the state and its regional peripheries. The grandmothers are not merely elderly citizens; they are the final, scarred guardians of an abandoned civilization. The doorway they occupy is inherently liminal—neither fully enclosed within the dying domestic sphere nor participating in a wider public life.

The poem then turns from the threshold to the rooms behind them, where the domestic interior is transformed by a heavy metaphor: “Behind them the rooms are still set / for children who married the highway.” To marry the highway is to owe one’s labor, physical presence, and future to the metropolitan systems that drain the provinces. The highway acts as a rival, predatory lineage that snaps the local thread. The domestic detail of the “still set” rooms underscores an unresolved, static waiting that defines the lived reality of those left behind.

Against that static waiting, the final movement expands the poem’s attention beyond human boundaries. The speaker notes that on Sundays, the church bells ring “for a population larger than the living.” This acknowledgment honors the historical density of the place, where inherited communities outnumber the survivors.

Micozzi builds a simple, cumulative ladder of fidelity in the closing lines:

The dead attend faithfully.
So do the cats.
So does the fig tree,
which has no interest in demographics
and keeps making sweetness
for mouths that have moved away.

The plain syntax deliberately connects the human dead, the domestic animal, and the botanical entity through the repetitive deployment of “So do” and “So does.” The fig tree emerges as the poem’s ultimate site of quiet resistance. By stating that the tree “has no interest in demographics,” the poem rejects the metric-driven logic that validates a place only by its economic or human volume.

The fig tree operates on an entirely separate timescale. Its persistence—”keeps making sweetness”—is both biological fact and rhythmic counterforce. After the spare declarative clauses of the closing sequence, the phrase lengthens the poem’s cadence: keeps presses the action into ongoing time, while making sweetness slows the line through its soft consonants and open vowels. The ending therefore does not resolve the poem’s losses, but it changes the pace at which we encounter them. Sweetness continues to be made, patiently and uselessly, for “mouths that have moved away.” That final metonymy reduces the emigrated human population to a series of consuming absences, highlighting the deep, tragic irony of a landscape that continues to provide sustenance long after its people have been forced to leave.

By ending with this unresolved generosity, the poem refuses both nostalgia and despair. It neither restores the village nor sentimentalizes its disappearance. Instead, it asks the reader to attend to what remains: memory, thresholds, bells, animals, trees, and the stubborn sweetness of a place still making itself available to people who may never return.

 

About the writer:
GABRIELE MICOZZI is an Italian writer and essayist based between the Marche and Rome. His work moves through systemic horror, civic and ecological poetry, and experimental forms. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Asymptote, Strange Horizons, American Poetry Journal, Heavy Feather Review, Space and Time Magazine, The Ecological Citizen, Ballast Journal, and other venues.

About the reader:
JEFF STREEBY, associate editor at O:JA&L, is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and educator who holds an MFA from New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. His acclaimed and widely published writing explores nuances of rural American life. AI tools were used in this essay to assist with drafting and proof-reading. Final authorship, editorial judgment, and responsibility for the essay belong to Jeff Streeby.

Image: triste fantasticheria (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2026. Public domain via Midjourney AI.

This project was made possible, in part, through support from
Richard Stimac and his new book BLOOD, WATER, AND STONE

available now from Spartan Press.

OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.

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