Michael Boccardo

ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS, YOU KNOW
MY NAME

If a center exists, you bury it here:
teeth, tongue, the symptoms of speech.

Is it Winter?  —always 
collapsing. Or Fall? –clumsy & loose, leaving
us bundled in our grief like old newsprint.  

Think back—those syllables 
you thought extinct, the earth a dull ache, untouched 
by snow or a scissoring of limbs.
How deep you must’ve dug 

before the forest finally cleared its throat, as if to say,
Enough . . . that’s enough now.

But to stop 
meant baring each little curse 
you carried away.
This is how you give
yourself a home, a name. Built
from the dead 
animal of your crime. 

See how 
its blood still shines. Its body      
still warm.

Michael Boccardo’s poems have appeared in various journals, including Kestrel, storySouth, Santa Clara Review, Mid-American Review, Iron Horse, The Maynard, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, and 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 four-time Pushcart Nominee and a finalist for the James Wright Poetry Award. He resides in High Point, NC, with three rambunctious tuxedo cats. Additional work can be found at www.michaelboccardo.com