“And When It Happens My Body Doesn’t Remember That You Are Gone” by Rosa Castellano

Photo by Yasser Abu-Ghdaib on Unsplash

 

When a memory 

feathers through you 

 

mid-step 

mid-speak 

mid-breath 

 

and the hairs on your arms 

rise as if in answer to a call 

only your bones can hear 

and you find yourself 

standing in your kitchen 

 

or bathroom 

or in whatever place 

 

you have wandered into 

with your chest squeezed tight 

 

because 

when it happens 

 

when someone you love 

dies, it’s never just the once. 

 

In this four-part rendering of loss from her devastatingly crafted debut collection, “All Is The Telling” (Diode Editions, 2025), Rosa Castellano fans through the story of a life. In a meticulously rendered — yet breathtakingly raw — lyric freeverse, she flips to random pages, and we find the same stain on each one, as though somebody has held a pen to the table of contents and the black ink has bled all the way through to the acknowledgments.

The stain is the death of a brother. It’s bigger on some pages. Darker. Still palpably wet, even, when the narrator imagines kissing him in the moments before the motorcycle crash that ends his life. But it confronts us, too, in the moments we expect to be immaculate; graduations, the birth of a child, the small and wide successes of parenthood. 

 

When it happens, I have just given 

 

birth to my son and through 

the thinness of the hospital gown 

 

the floor against my hip is cool. 

I’ve fallen. Fainted in the doorway 

 

of a bathroom and later the nurse 

 

will say it was the emptiness 

my body hasn’t adjusted to. 

 

By swerving in and out of moments both mundane and precipitous just to emerge before the paralyzing oncoming headlights of irrevocable tragedy in each, Castellano shows vividly the reverberant carnage of a wreck she never describes. The bent metal is there, though, in the twist of her words around each instance of forgetting, in the retaliatory shock of remembering that follows. This is  felt all the more deeply because it exists only in the narrator’s imagination; she wasn’t there. She didn’t see it. She couldn’t touch it, no matter how persistently it touches her. 

Often, traumatic grief comes from bearing witness to an event, trapping the survivor in a seemingly endless, inescapable replay. Sometimes, however, it is the absence of the visible that creates the void, that lets all the terrible creations of the mind elaborate limitlessly upon what might have happened, unburdened by the certainty that would otherwise confine it to memory.

Rosa Castellano

As the poem progresses, evolves and processes “what’s left behind, caught/ in the net of our bodies,” we are shown a light. The stain becomes a reminder that all our grief is love turned inside out, and it’s made of the same stuff that writes the story of our lives.