“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—
Eva Alter is a poet and cataloger of internal mythologies. Her debut chapbook, AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES, was published by Eulogy Press in October 2025, and her work is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Bruiser Magazine, Appalachian Journal, and elsewhere. She can be found at evaalterpoet.com, @eva_alter_poet on Twitter/X, and @eva.alter.poet on Instagram.