You Might Not Think that You Do this, but You Do
Propionibacterium
A young Bill Clinton waited in line until the very last minute before lifting his hand. Forced to take a step forward, President Kennedy faced him squarely through the crowd of American Legion boys. Alexey Leonov used his strong grip to bleed air from a distended spacesuit. Having crash-landed soon after in Siberian snow, he hid from wolves in the broken capsule for two nights, emerging to greet his rescuers with hands warmed in his crotch. Jean Chrétien practiced the Shawinigan Handshake on the throats of hecklers. The night of the second Québec referendum, I was pushed against him on Parliament Hill. His gloved hand made my eyes water with its vinegar stink. When Kim Jong-il shook your hand, you knew you were loved. He practiced strenuously, injecting members of his staff with painkillers. All available photographic evidence suggests Margaret Thatcher offered Nelson Mandela a boiled sparrow shortly after his release from prison. When it’s cold, I wipe blood on other people. A jackknife folded into my thumb years ago camping. I was carving a whistle. Cleaning myself in the lake, leeches arrived as lips jawlessly pursing in the digital weeds. Winters, the wound opens its fly, dry skin splitting along the scar seam, blood spotting my grip like electoral ink. The unfinished whistle appears with its primitive signal, the unconscious urge among people who shake hands to bring those shaken hands to their noses and mouths to smell them.
A Minor Excretory Organ
Lead Blood 1.36 ug/dL
It’s easy to feel detached. But it’s easy to eat someone else’s stray hair in a salad. This is globalization. You can raise a glass of water to adulthood, confident you’ve done everything right, but still the companies are counting on us to love that part of ourselves that is them. One way to solve a complicated problem is to endure a smaller version of the same problem. The carousel was sourced from Toronto’s Sunnyside Park, but Disney wanted only galloping horses, so their legs were broken and the horses refitted. Collections of baby teeth were started in 1958 to measure levels of strontium-90 in people living near nuclear plants. When the king gave a single strand of hair, or let his hair be touched, his courtiers knew he had just paid them his most valued compliment.
Heterotrophies
Streptococcus mutans
Hunger is always gamed by quorum sensing. Enough cup holders eat drive-thrus. Enough drive-thrus eat long suburban commutes. Shift work eats the microflora that eat your lunch. Out west, the highways are grass-fed and the Alberta Advantage is one way of learning to feel a gingival recession. At the community centre, overfed bodies heave overboard into glittering tap water. Table sugar accumulates and must be cleared from the streets. Like commemorative plaques from our centenary cakes, once the pleasure centres are discovered, we leave the stove on for entire forests and stop brushing. Some foods make us even hungrier. It makes sense that the germs would want to kill and mount us.
By all Means, Sure, Certainly, Absolutely
Arsenic Blood 11 nmol/L
The actor who played the gravedigger was my friend’s father. After his parents split, we’d cut class to deal stud in his mother’s basement. My first time voting was in the Charlottetown referendum, a constitutional bed skirt hung out to dry like poorly laundered regionalism. When my friend’s father showed up at the polling station without ID, I vouched for him, though I wondered why he’d driven there without a licence. During the summer, I piled wood at the mill, filled orders, and hid behind the hemlock lifts by the river smoking menthols. He would show up occasionally in a small dented pickup looking for plywood and strapping. The community theatre was building one last set before the festival went underwater. Deficit hawks were dive-bombing the new vanishing points of civil expediency and I started to believe that the pits of Ontario peaches had arsenic in them. As it turns out, 100 g of peach seed contains 88 mg of cyanide. The arsenic was in the pressure-treated lumber I cut and stacked every day. The sawdust smelled of a fresh deck of cards. It hung in the air near the radial arm saw like a biography unable to hold narrative coherence, like a dream protecting sleep by making everything familiar.
