“the pathological sublime” —Wendell Holmes

“a battleship caught in a thorax, a jackstone stuck in an esophagus, a padlock not quite at home inside a stomach”

“how these things might have gotten inside a body”

“their arrangement into a cosmology of things”

“our bodies are implicated”

“never merely an intellectual encounter”

“most of all, we are reminded of our mouths”

“the complex physiology of the human swallow”

“we might even gasp or gulp before his display”

“a foreign body in the body is not a rarity, an exception, or a wonder, but a commonplace event”

“swallowing things the wrong way”

“a museum of pathological specimens”

“slipping a sword into the gullet”

“the admission of play”

“the consequences of our imaginations”

“the tongue as an eagerly developing muscle detached from licks and tastes”

“Chang ‘E”
To build a house: one is for shelter, the other to unfold, and in the distance is the difference between sunlight in a field and the lesser seen light of the other sky. (42)

“Goddess Tin Hau”
an ocean fever to break between my teeth (53)

“Chang ‘E”
A home is not a home until you build it. (55)

“In Which the City-Island Is”
an intimate wilderness, a place for hiding, high walls (83)

“Chang ‘E:”
We pretend that a body loves a person, but a body loves a ghost. A body loves the house. A body loves the moon. (118)

“Chang ‘E:”
A stranger, a disturbance, so I held my ear to the ground, my mouth to the sky. (135)
In the morning when I woke, my teeth felt cold and light fell away from their appropriate objects. (135)

“Chang ‘E:” (whole poem)
Ever   transitioning / toward some old / nocturnal light, / we pretend it is / not in vain. We / are all night- / ridden   insects. / Unstuck,itwaves / aflicker— (119)

My body wasn’t taken with me, the soul being a very spacious ([specious]) thing. (7)