Anatomic - Adam Dickinson

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by swabbing various areas of my body for bacteria –hand, genitals, ear, nose, and mouth. I obtain a deep metagenomeand virome characterization of a stool sample, plus additional markergene sequencing(srrna, srrnaand its) to characterize not justthe bacteria but also the viruses, microbial eukaryotes, and fungi inmy gut. I have some initial difficulty sending this sample across theborder. I am a spectacular and horrifying assemblage. I resemble abattery. I wear uranium from well water in the Canadian Shield and––

      from the nuclear testing that marks me as a child of the Cold War. Ihouse bacterial colonies that have become empires of the Westerndiet, fuelled by sugar, salt, and fat. I summon the energy to write byway of a metabolism already written. What is inscribed in me is inyou, too.––

      hormoneA few individualstogetherconstitute a crowd.3 ppm of bromine,500 ppm of benzene,5 mg of arsenic,500 colony-forming units per millilitre of tap water.✲In the sexual partsof material historyevery beliefhas its crowd,every crowd,its medium.✲Some crowds are slowand wanderthe wilderness.––

      It’s not always the remotenessof the goalor the splendourof the pilgrims.Some includeevery memberthey’ve ever hadand ever will have.One lifetimereaches intothe nextlike a sleeve.Some crowdsaccumulatein the reproductive organsof their maxims.✲Casseroles, tea,die-ins at the stripmallconstituency office.Fruit stand vendoron fire.The crowd ––

      is an accumulationof what cannotget out of the way.✲Herd animalswere huntedfor foodbut also for the feelingtheir numbers gavethe hunters.Let there be moreof us, they prayedand enviedthe buffalo meatthat built railroadsand fuelled wagon trains.Their hair was stuffedinto furniture. Shitburned for heat.Every nationfeels it is promisedthe whole earth.Every nationsits atopa pileand waits.✲––

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      Adam, in order to test your body for the rangeof chemicals you have requested, you will needto send in approximately 62 mL of serum, equiv-alent to about 150 mL of whole blood, andapproximately 6 mL of urine. Both the urineand serum should be sent in amber glass jarsand cooled to below 4ºC. Using the morningvoid would be best. There are no other restric-tions besides making sure that the serum sampledoes not come into contact with any Teflon.––

      agents orange, yellow, and redYou are either for chlorine or for the plague. Right now is the cleanest we have ever been, and for this you must love aerial defoliants or you love communism. Under the bandage of this one-industry town closing ranks around staples of forestry and fish, the wound is wide-eyed and headstrong. Through the clearing, freshwater carp blink past the graves of missionaries who introduced them to the New World. Northern rivers are warmed by the paper mill’s piss, which, like making the world safe for democracy, slowly leaked into my childhood, yellowing the lipophilic paperbacks of my adipose fat. You are for pulp or for poverty. You respect the Constitution or you stare at the ground lost in bankruptciesfor herring gull beaks or blurredembryos in cormorant colonies. Every erected media platform reduces the problem of war to a problem of tint. During the Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned by government agents who haywired his food with dioxin. His face flared into pages of acne. You are either for the red or the white blood cells, for the tops of trees, or the bottoms.––2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (serum): 1.304348 pg/g lipid

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      I filled seventy-six vials of blood. The centrifuge I used would takeonly small tubes, which is why I needed so many. My veins were amess. I took short breaks to walk around the room swinging myhands. By the end of it, I was drawing from both arms and yankingon the tourniquet with my teeth. My generous assistant was not a trained phlebotomist. We did itduring his free time at the university. The university eventuallyfound out what we had done. New policies were put in place.––

      fruit beltMy wife and I cough differently. She leans into her sleeve, encouragingreplacement leaders. I am less sanguine about stems and must covermy mouth during toasts. She is shade tolerant and takes her asthmafor a run in ravines ravaged by dog-eared understories. I cough totest my inguinal narratives for spring on automated blossoms beardedwith hair triggers. She coughs at the same time as applause, sensitiveto the seedless struggle for dominance that defines our clingstonegeneration. I blow out birthday candles on other peoples’ cakes. Sheis generous to a fault and cuts to the chase with a cocktail sword,hands on her hips like the last native variety pulled up by free trade.Post-nasal, I reverse into parking spaces, wiping out the element ofsurprise. Dry and persistent, she encrypts her skin with moisturizers.Cacophony is inflammation. The residue of every suppressant we’veever tried keeps bucking within us like a bronchus. We listen at nightfor the croup of airguns keeping the migratory birds from theorchards. Our girls sleep through it in the room next door.––Carbofuranphenol (urine): <0.1 ug/LDimethylphosphate (urine): 2.6 ug/L4,4'-DDT (serum): 5.072464 ng/g lipid

      hormone✲Firein a crowded theatreis constrainedby free speech.The more easily a thing burnsthe less it can defenditself from freedom.Each personsees the doorthrough whichthey may freely pass.Frames punishtheir pictures.The same flamesgive different versionsof resistance,but the more one has to say,the more one is captiveto the ovensjoining togetherwhat was separatein the shortest possible time.Animals fleethe freedom of the forestfor the burning streets.The arsonist livesalone with the freelyassociated details––

      of a confession.Suppressed in one placeit rises in another,the enemy of free spirits.There is no escapingthe free world.It surrounds uslike an aspirinin a drink.When it seemscrowded with fire,the tramplingthat accompanies panicis just the urgeto stomp it out.✲––

      It looked like I was going to have to shit in Buffalo. Ineeded to send a stool sample across the borderand it would be easier to simply go to Buffalo,produce what needed to be produced, and send itfrom there. The problem was that it appeared I wasgoing to need a significant amount – more than onesitting. And I would have to freeze it. I wasn’t holdingout much hope for a hotel room with a deep freezer.I weighed my options. Strange to spend a weekendin Buffalo with the sole purpose of collecting andmailing my poop. In the end, the paperwork camethrough and I carefully placed everything to hardenin our basement freezer.––

      galactic acidFor the first two years of my life, my mother’s vaginal flora lived inmy stomach. Consigned to the edge of their star system, they ateeverything I ate, fermenting chains of starch into acids that fed thehigh-energy demands of trying to erect an antenna. The flora flexedfor deep space, convinced they weren’t alone. They transmitted theircontractions and hoped to reach aliens before the terrible facsimilesof the 1970s: humans drawn without sex organs and burdened bymessages whose content had become instructions for reading. Setamidst this mucosa, a gram-stained parabolic reflector waited forword from newcomers. We’re a lot alike, my mother and I. Ourdisdain for underachieving campsites and the way we signal for helpby maintaining a slight underbite during awkward conversations. Hervagina made me cosmopolitan. A dialectic crowned in the forest, itsmany antlers have since come to crowd my self-possession with spentvelvet. I watch my mother favour her disintegrating hips. The smallparty that le her for the new world founded a settlement on a moonshe still tracks without looking. Its tidal pull on the pit of her stomachmakes her pause at the zenith of a phone call: ‘What is it?’––Lactobacillus acidophilus

      hormone✲Anxiety waits for a table under a cave painting. Water stirred with a spear. Keeping it together is a form of digestion, and digestion is a form of commitment to the dignity of letting it go. One part of you, as an act of survival, starts eating another part. This is a membranous decision in which the crowd, having mistaken its periphery, resembles its prey. It was unbearable to see the possum lying

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