Simone Pozzessere

Lay me on an autopsy table,
opened up next to the other men in the morgue.

My insides will be fried by the too bright fluorescent lights,
all the blood will be drained from my heart
and the fluid will be sucked from my spine.

There will be no change for fresher air in my blackened lungs,
no reflective movement to brush the sweater-induced static from my hair
and antiseptic would burn my nostrils to bloody caverns.

Ants would crawl into my arteries,
beetles would race them in parallel in the sucked-dry veins.
The butterflies in my stomach would convert back into caterpillars,
the wasps would build a nest in my chest cavity.

But my brain would still flicker and sputter,
the frontal lobe in my left hemisphere would light up on the screen,
my motor cortex would fail to
make me reach for paper and ink
just one last word
one last thought
one last story.

I’m not too young to die
I lived my life,
I’m too young to stop
someone needs to hear
someone needs to remember
someone needs to own my same knowledge
of the way your hair covers your ears and breezes blow in the summer.

I’ll run out of air and blood,
of spinal fluid and tears to cry
but not of words and thoughts,
disagreements and snarky remarks.

Wernicke would say I can still hear
Broca would point out that I’m still
producing words in my sinapses
Fritsch and Hitzig would remark that,
like in the dog they studied first,
it’s over
I’ll not say anything anymore.

–

Simone Pozzessere (they/he) is a bilingual trans man from southern Italy who has loved poetry since his first Italian literature lesson in middle school. He mostly writes poetry but between his works there are non-fiction essays too. He has no previous publications but several submissions.