The station wagon was bent,
an inverted v-shape, peaked
at the center, so that our luggage
pressed against the rear window
like anxious children wanting out.

Other drivers proclaimed it a miracle
when we stepped from that metal
whole and smooth and young.

Tell me you remember this too,
how you sprawled as if dead across the wreckage.
Give them something to look at, you said,
meaning the Spring Breakers slowing
to photograph our small disaster.
But your body, imitating death,
only excited them more. You gave up
and rose from twisted steel, resurrected.

The policemen huddled in patrol cars, sketching
facts, diagramming our history, while we stood
in an open field, not minding the rain
and its generous illusions

how it made it easy to believe
in impossible things: a shattered man
rising from the dead, or the inevitable clasping
of our own cold, no longer shaking, hands.

Theresa Boyar