Closer Than Skin

Does blood scream?
Does blood scream?
Milk screams.
It screams and screws with its tiny little  hands. Listen
It smells like
the voices
of the owls.
Do you know what the owls said to me,
mother?
I could hear the pleading behind their shrieks. Softer than the dust of moths. It whispers.
Weialala leia. Wallala leialala.

He whispers milk. He bleeds honey. From his eyes.
His tears smell like milk. His teeth scream like owls. Like thunder.
It ripples like the shapes under your skin, perpetually writhing.
Infinitititite needles.
It hears, like the skin of your sister, the skin on the scalp, between the hair, within the hair, the skin that covers the hair of your mother. It fits like
a tongue
inside a mouth,
whispering the name of the last secret, but never arriving any closer from where it started.
Slipping between reality softly as the hands that wrung her neck,
once,
twice,
all over.
It's slips slips n e e d l e s s l i p s i n n e r in her.

Watching with dustwork eyes, mouths too dry to cough all but the shadowed dreams of the moths.
 Faces with dustwork eyes, infinite fingers, small eyes, shrunken eyes, faces shrunken smaller still.
 Weialala leia. Wallala leialala.
The chimes.
Heartbeat.

I heard it
 as she watched.
He's a shadow to me, always there, bigger than the object casting it, deeper than the absence of light.
 He's a shadow to me, the needles slip sinner.
I bit into her like a peach, and her skin felt like mushroom, like the gills of a much room underneath my finger nails.
The owl said.
I can hear it now, the milk.
There is never a time I can't.
Even when I close my eyes as tightly as I can, disappear from the world
 just as we suspected
 as children.

Unspool thread. They all whisper. The needless lips in her.
I bit into her dead skin and it
smelled like citrus but it
tasted like breath, tasted like
midnight, when you eat in your dreams,
suck suck suck lick lick lick sticky sticky ice cream,
and it feels like sandpaper on your tongue and it tastes like your tongue,
like the earliest memories of drinking milk,
back when it may have well been blood.
Even the nose tastes it.
Close your mouth and breathe through your nose,
smell, and taste how it tastes
like ice cream in dreams,
already melted away.

It isn't enough.
The blanket screams against my skin, in this memory.
The skin that covers her hair. The blanket feels like sandpaper, like dust, like ice cream.
Sticky sticky sticky sticky lick it up quick quick quick.
Only you can't lick fast enough. And you can't turn away, or fall asleep, because you're already awake, and already dreaming.
As a child the curtains were so big.
Longer than needles.

And the sinner is there, bleeding milk, whispering honey, screaming like bees.
The sinner is always there.
Touching her.
Closer than skin.