When you ask Betty Bloomerz how she learned to swallow swords, her answer is somehow even more unbelievable than the act of swallowing a sword in the first place: She just tried. She got the idea in 2007, when she came across a photo of a sword swallower online. Suddenly she had to swallow one herself. Bloomerz admits that this urge made no sense, but the fact that someone could swallow a sword seemed to redefine what was possible.

Video by Sasha Arutyunova

At the time, Bloomerz was a yoga teacher (and still used her birth name, Kiri Hochendoner). After contacting the woman in the photo for advice, she started to wake up early before class to read “Memoirs of a Sword Swallower,” by Daniel P. Mannix — considered the discipline’s urtext. At night she paged through anatomy books, tracing the path a sword could take inside the body. From practicing yoga, she knew her body well, but she didn’t know the contours of her actual organs.

There are no shortcuts to swallowing a sword. The blade winds down the same path as breakfast — past the lips and into the throat, then down the length of the esophagus and into the stomach. Nothing about the inside of the body is readily designed to accommodate a sword. For one, a sword is straight, and the digestive tract is twisty. Then there’s the issue of the gag reflex (the body’s way of saying, “Don’t put a sword in here!”). Farther past the gag reflex, the lower esophageal sphincter contracts involuntarily to maintain order down there; a sword swallower must learn to relax these muscles consciously — the kind of strange and ineffable talent you can only teach yourself.

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To avoid internal trauma, Bloomerz practiced 10 times a day, but never more. She maneuvered the sword, sussing out empty space inside her body. Progress was addictive. “As you get used to the sensation of cold metal against your inner body temperature, your muscles start to listen and know that it’s O.K.,” she says. “And then your body begins to trust you, and to grab it. All those little centers, all of my muscles, they just open up — and then it drops.”

In between gigs on the Lower East Side.

Some swallowers are born virtuosos, dropping a sword in a matter of months. For Bloomerz, it took a year of exploration. Until she fully swallowed a sword, she never believed she’d ever swallow one at all. (She says she can’t brush her teeth without gagging.) For years, she worked in a Coney Island sideshow, but now she travels wherever there is an opportunity. She recently returned from a stint in Dubai, along with her husband, Ray Valenz, who also swallows swords. (There’s a lid for every pot!)

One recent Saturday she performed at Duane Park, a burlesque dinner theater club on the Bowery. As bachelorette parties dined on prix fixe chicken breast, Bloomerz slid a sword into the space beside her heart, then dropped to the floor in a side split. Over the years she has learned to expand her repertoire and play with tension and surprise, grace and wonder, horror and disgust. “It can be any number of emotional things that you’re relaying,” she says. “You can tell any kind of story with a sword in your mouth.”