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11 Feeding And yet to me mornings for Frank still begin in yellow bile and blood breaking, burning over, eating the pink hole in his gut where the j-tube fingerbones out from a jejunum that’s starving, always, to be plugged into another hi-cal sack of slurry. Eight cans a day and he can’t keep up his weight. And he stays up all night shitting and riding a spike of mixed-meds. Then the haunting, the dragging of his body through the dark halls and rooms, behind panes of frosted glass, after the world has collapsed into sheets. The tape is soggy and slipping, the tube always inching out and scratching like a thorn. He slips into the bathroom, sits, and at last he falls asleep then falls off the toilet, tearing the paper skin that wraps his knees and knuckles. Acid, dammed behind the belly’s cavity, spills. Screams don’t come but backdraft into a suck of sighs. If he had a stomach he would vomit. If he had a pistol he might use it. If he could reach the pack of Lucky’s right side up on the sink he’d be okay. Not alone. A reptile of sweat and shake, he pushes himself to his knees, wobbles 12 back onto his cold, clawed feet, moves slowly into the hall and bends along the corridor of photos that grin him into the gluey light of dawn. ...

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