Biosentimentality
The emotional complications that arise after one person’s tissue is sutured into another’s. Patients
will often imagine a relationship to their tissue donors.
When the black Lab chewed off my nose
and hard palate, I’d passed
out from the pinot
noir and white
handful of Ambien. And when
I finally reached for my cigarettes, one slipped
from the hole
where my lips had vanished. He must’ve
been hungry. I must’ve been
unconscious on the bath mat
all week without waking. When the surgeons
sewed a dead woman’s nose, lips, and chin
to my skull, I didn’t ask
her name or where
she was from, but the papers
printed it: a middle-
aged suicide who’d hanged herself in her French
village just days
before the operation. And when I began
to regain the taste
of a tangerine’s meat, the whiff of menthol
from a stale pack, I could feel her
senses still pulsing. I repainted
my bathroom from a bucket
of French blue, hung a thrift-store
portrait of a cottage near the window. I got
strong men to tear
out the tub and replace it
with a claw-foot. I put
a provincial armoire in the corner. Once, I dropped
my robe to the carpet and caught myself
nude in the mirror—the frame always
tilted slightly back—
I had to stop
staring at my neck. When my right hand
moved to unhook
my rose gold chain, I felt myself
tug just once, and the skin
under my chin rippled. That’s when I tore
each swinging curtain
in the house from its rod, each loose
lace tie, I removed
every possible noose. 
Biosentimentality
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