the goose a prisoner is a shadow of a strangulation. Odysseus’s sadness as he tried to embrace the shade of his mother–hugs in Hades are impossible. Had he known that violence is what allows us to seize the phantasms of our dead loves, perhaps he would have been more Oedipal with his mother’s ghost. Transplanted into the bowels of New York from the carcass of Houston, the goose a prisoner, though immaterial, is unable to escape the tight grip of a chokehold that is self-administered.