You believe we make our own luck, old war injuries burning beneath your rolled shirtsleeves. There's a version of self, then the version purified from the version. Turns out, much moves between species. When there are no words, we invent them. Love is opportunity + likelihood + proximity, but luck's a different algorithm. Is an idea really lack of experience? Someone's always on the make, on the decline, on the verge, in love, out of love. If a man is shot at close range with a musket, he should die, but lo—a fistula, a string, gastric juices. If a scientist feeds a man on a string through a hole in his side, does the wounded man still feel hunger? I don't remember my birth, but hunger was one of the first things I knew. After light, after a doctor's two too tight hands holding me here for the world that would have me.

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In 1822 Alexis St. Martin was shot with a musket at close range. He was expected to die, but a U.S. army doctor, William Beaumont, performed surgery. St. Martin's wound healed to a fistula, leaving a hole open directly to his stomach. Over the next eleven years, Beaumont performed numerous experiments on St. Martin, including tying food to a string to study digestion and metabolism. These crude experiments ushered modern thinking into physiology, where observations guide conclusions, a principle that Dr. Frederick Banting used in the discovery of insulin. Before the discovery of insulin, type 1 diabetes was acutely fatal.