For When I am Gaining Weight…

// Isabel Armiento

I am tempted to look like two strands of DNA, long and lean and geometric-chic, two impossibly thin legs
winding around each other, composed of glittering shapes and straight lines, hard-blown glass pieces,
stuck together to form a colour-by-number replica of what humanness looks like.

Adenine is rose-pink, thymine is butter-yellow. Strips of science wound up to look like a towering woman,
model, archetype. Clean plastic stitched into ribs, collarbone, warm heart.

All angles measurable with a protractor, tetrahedral bonds one-hundred-and-nine degrees exactly,
no room for error, no room for the fluid curves of flesh that are impossible to put a number on, flesh that
rolls and bounces and folds and hangs loosely, flesh that can fit inside a lover’s hand, that can be held,
the stuff of connection, the stuff that makes us human.