“Like a teenage car wreck,
No survivors, just God,
Breathing on the last moments
Of the child, living.”
- Chronic, Cynthia Cruz
I lost my inner boundary first, like
Rodanthe’s eroding sealine—its saber-winds a
sandbar’s checkmate—my cascading teenage
calamity a cyclic collision. T-boned car-
skeleton—strangled fate an echoed wreck:
[Cursed contortion conundrum] No inner rudder—no
means to grasp a future—no survivors
left from that seventh grade interoceptive hit: just
nerves looping imagined rescue by God—
We never had our own frontiers: pulse patterned breathing
at once in Mom’s womb—twin revenants—on
the cusp of adulthood your amygdala blew. The
doom-patterned chemical frontier, our last
binding breath: bargained bruised future—Forensic moments
divined there then will never be rid of
synaptic sickness. I dreamt the sun shone our shared child-
grief into splendor—Shame—Drowned by living—