Anatomic. Adam Dickinson

against the accumulated wealth that acquires a house with an aquarium big enough to require its own diver, against the majuscule Idea of refined sugars and depictions of capital concentrating on its breathing, ––

      there is this hopeful monster. You breastfeed the survivor with coded plans for escape. The signal slips through undetected like the possum and its adaptive capacity to convincingly die.✲––

      mouthfeelThe tongue map is wrong. There are buds downto the commonwealth. What was the bliss point of African blood in the table sugars of Europe? Every year, spinach produces a sugar in its leavescomparable to the world’s annual outputof iron ore.Without hurting the taste, a young child can standto keep a hand in cold water longer with a sweet mouth. The faster starch ––Catenibacterium mitsuokaiBacteroides

      converts to Christianity, the quicker each outreach over police radios. O my sweet tooth, my oatmeal raisin, my poisoned tipped candy apple cart. Pleasure from food is the air waving goodbye in heat,distortedlike an inherited empire. In this way, we are closest to people who touchwhat we eat.Captives of loneliness stare into icing. I know enough about the cherry on top to lick around the sides.––

      I had to keep a food diary before obtaining my stoolsample. I had never paid such close attention towhat I ate before. The Word-made-flesh of a sweetpotato. The onion domes of Russia in the garlicbulb’s imperial fibre. All those calories packed intoa few grams of butter, a bowl of pasta. All thosecalories knitted into the harvesting and flatbeds,sewn delicately into the crop dusts and mists thatmake them inhospitable to the insects and fungithat are their first and most desirous admirers. If Iate less, I would limit the pcbs, pesticides, and metalsthat could get in, right? This idea consumed me.––

      integrated pest managementIt is enzyme hour.Front lawns part their hair,waiting for instructions.Fat kids run throughsprinklers with shirts onover grass growingshapelessly in the deciduous forests of the large intestine.With mid-century Manichaeism,many a man has lustedaer Wrigley Field,its pre-emptive stripesagainst the perennial apologistsfor divided cells.Be aliveto your inner bowling green,its role in the spread of the horse, the wheel,and the postwar laboratory limb. Grassclimbs out of the limbic systeminto changing climatesof sex, hunger, offspring care.‘Play outside,’ my mother scolded. I was fertilized by early cultivars of pasteurized milk and river muckyolking my handswith ventilated eagle eggs.We hate the insects.––Aldrin (serum): 0.7391304 ng/g lipidChlordane, oxy- (serum): 7.681159 ng/g lipid2,4'-DDD (serum): 0.7391304 ng/g lipid

      We hate themunder the streetlightswith their primitive foreshadows. Our solution is perfectly safe. When people try to commit suicide by drinking it,they fail regularly.––

      ––When the results started to arrive, I felttense. A door was about to open into a mail-room filled with incommunicable antibodiesstrung from a bare wire. I read them quickly,not wanting to let my eyes linger on anythingalarming. When I came across a chemicalthat measured among the top percentiles, Ipanicked. I felt sick. Cortisol dripped. Deathcomes like a letter that folds its recipients.

      ∆

      F

      at is an organ. It echoes with music and memory. Fat is a slowlyoscillating wave. It embodies the constancy of transition, cling-ing as a perpetually updated fuel reserve, an accumulationexpressing – through hourglasses, pears, and apples – the energybalance of a life being lived. Fat is a metaphysics conditioning expe-riences of reality. It regulates hormones and directs the transitionalmodalities of metabolic processes. Fat provides stability, padding,and insulation to equip a body in transition, moving through climatesand calories, catastrophes and capitalism. Fat feeds us, but Western-style commerce has afflicted many parts of the world with obesity.Children are filled with accelerated derivatives of excavated sunlightand profitably supply-chained processed foods. Fat is an archive ofthis historical moment. Military, industrial, and agricultural historybioaccumulate in adipose tissues. I have found one of the most widelydistributed environmental contaminants on the planet in my body:polychlorinated biphenyls, pcbs. Principally manufactured byMonsanto for industrial and commercial applications, these lipophilicpollutants collect like comment sections in the fat of creatures every-where. If we test for them, we will find them. pcbs constitute a formof writing in the Anthropocene, a recursive script where industrialinnovations find their way back into the metabolic messaging systemsof the biological bodies that have created them. As edits, as subtlerevisions to the hormonal cascades that precipitate bodily morpholo-gies and affective experiences of the world, pcbs are messages in thefat of our humanity.The first section of ‘Lipids’ appropriates language from The Handwriting Analyst’s Toolkit:Character and Personality Revealed through Graphologyby Peter West (New York: Barron’sEducational Series, Inc., 24.). Each of the eight stanzas successively treats the eightletters in the word ‘Monsanto,’ using language associated with the graphological analysisof each letter. Until it ceased production in 1977, Monsanto was the source of approximately99 percent of the pcbs used by U.S. industries. ––