- Tomography
a technique for imaging a section of a solid object, i.e. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan
Mundane most pain but worsenedfor worry. In the blurry tube arcsthe ray
in its literal, invisible
halo. Always a hallowing, to know—
Early missionariescouldn’t halve abstraction from the concretefor the Chinese
as each discarnatedwelled in hanzai, materialized
in symbol— here
my body’s remade, pixelby grayscale pixel, and still,nothing more
defined
for me inside of me, though the oncologistcircles the sentinel
node [End Page 31]
and offers his fists to illustrate (here’s thechurch, here’s the
steeple)how the body fates itself
by how (open it up)
and what (look at all)
it divides. (the people.) [End Page 32]
Emilia Phillips is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013) and two chapbooks. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry appears in AGNI, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She serves as the prose editor of 32 Poems, on staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and as the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.