They’d been in hiding,
in their buff folder,

those dusty X-ray films,
since nineteen-ninety.

Not that I’d been seeking –
no, had I sought such

I risked being unwrought
(or so I thought).

Like the night Ma said,
she said, she did, that I

had been conscious
throughout.

As we were driven to
the American airbase,

I lay across her lap, staring up,
the faded houndstooth

flexing with doubled amber
pulses from the verge

of the night
(or so it seemed).

No, you see I
should have died there,

a vacuum in my heart
fixing me at only three,

right there, upon my mother’s
knee – I shouldn’t be

alive, and yet here I
am, the didn’t-quite-die,

the there-but-for-the-grace-
of-God-go-I, the boy

with the bracketed bones.
These old X-rays ask,

“Are you so very special?”
(or so it seems).