#210: "Summer, 1983" by Michael Boccardo

~This poem was previously published in Cutthroat (2010).

Summer, 1983

On that last afternoon in June,

when the road still cracked

a dusty gravel whip beneath our feet

and no one could afford the luxury

of electric air, we crossed

over into our neighbor’s yard,

small bits of stone poking each

bare heel, already rubbed thick

and coarse as sandpaper. 

By the time we breathed

the perfumed thickets of dogwood

edging Bessie’s mailbox,

my mother’s toes glinted with mica,

ten shimmering minnows

wiggling in blades of sun-stroked grass. 

Back then she was proud of her legs,

and wore nothing but tee-shirts and cutoffs,

denim sheared by a dull kitchen knife,

the threads floating like spider silk

around her thighs.  My brother and I trailed

behind, arms spiraling, embroiled in a battle

of plastic sacks, heavy with squash  

and zucchini plucked from our father’s garden,

too busy being boys to notice

anything wrong until the hiss

of coiled newspapers, a week’s worth,

skidded towards opposite corners

of the front porch.  When mother vanished,

a blurred shape behind the rattle of a screen door, 

we knew better than to move,

our shadows like drawn umbrellas, rigid

as we stood in currents of clover ankle-deep.

I was too young to understand

death then, but learned the ways it fooled

the world into living, how

it carried us back to where the day

began, hands gloved in soil, the sun

thirsty against our backs as we loosened

vines of tomatoes, bright bulbs dangling

like tangles of strung lights.  That night,

no one slept.  Thermometers simmered

above eighty while stars gathered

in clusters of condensation, 

windows gaping like the hooded eyes

of insomniacs.  In the kitchen,

mother busied herself until dawn,

slicing and canning.  With every glass jar

she cradled onto a pantry shelf,

her dress flared, each leg

clinging to the dark fabric

then swinging in a slow arc,

like the dome of a bell tolling the hour.

THE STORY BEHIND THE POEM

Although certain aspects of this poem are fictitious (my mother was never the one to discover our

neighbor’s body), many details ring true. Like most children growing up before the technology

age, some of the best times my brother and I spent together were those summers of skinned knees

and nails full of earth from our father’s garden. I wanted the nostalgia of that period to come

through, but I also wanted to convey how the fact of our neighbor’s death was such an oddity

during that time, particularly for me when I’d never had any experiences with a person’s passing.

One day all was normal, and the next, everything was altered. I’ve always been perplexed how

death does this: removes a certain ritual from our lives, yet continues to nudge us forward on this

treadmill of motions.

*****

ABOUT MICHAEL BOCCARDO

Michael Boccardo’s poems have been published in various journals, including Kestrel, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Lindenwood Review, Border Crossing, Rose Red Review, Best New Poets, as well as the anthologies Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose, and Art on HIV/AIDS and Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina.  He is a multiple Puschart nominee and a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Also, he serves as assistant editor for the poetry journal, Cave Wall, and resides in High Point, NC, with his husband and three tuxedo cats.