{"id":4646,"date":"2014-02-16T02:07:34","date_gmt":"2014-02-16T02:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/?p=4646"},"modified":"2014-02-16T02:07:34","modified_gmt":"2014-02-16T02:07:34","slug":"david-greenspan-from-milk-sickness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2014\/02\/16\/david-greenspan-from-milk-sickness\/","title":{"rendered":"David Greenspan || From Milk Sickness"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Milk Sickness<\/em><\/strong>
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\nNoise brays in the girl\u2019s chest, the sound of a child, much like a cat, kneading another\u2019s skin. Gluenoise, how strange it is to hear from my body, she thinks. A day of rain and salt, she thinks. She births three children of her own \u2013 the oldest a girl, the youngest a boy, the middle a carousel.
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\nToday, yellow flower television. Today, the girl\u2019s eyelids heavy with honey. Today, the children\u2019s first steps. They are a self-portrait of her thigh\u2019s drip. I must skin a holy man, she thinks, and place his viscera atop their heads.
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\nThe boy and girl build a house of misplaced limbs for their children. Inside, smoke rises, light disappears into soil. The children run wild. They say Mother, Father, do not think for one second we are anything but your harvest of hipbone.
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\nThe youngest doesn\u2019t smile once or even twice as the oldest plays with his favorite dogtooth. Sedatives bloom inside his gut like a choir of daylight. Stare now often and stare now long, the boy whispers to his children. Stare now until my grin is cigarette, he whispers to his children.
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\nThe boy today thinks of gospel choir, of stitching his throat to a cantor. He today thinks of opening his throat with a carving knife.
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\nThe middle child prays at the bottom of a swimming pool, hidden from a terrible color growing in its mouth. The middle child does not listen when the boy and girl say Water, no blood. The middle child does not listen when God as it understands God says This worship pours over you with its filthy hands, its uncertain keel.
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\nThe children entertain doctors while the boy\u2019s skin is removed for milk money. The boy\u2019s relatives send cards which read Our teeth are heavy with salt for your recovery<\/em>. They send their underwear dirty, their veins pristine. The youngest child says O father, let me invent language for your surgery \u2013 piano meat, matchstick bone.
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\nLet me gorge myself, the oldest child thinks, on marshmallow tender stitched to my mother\u2019s thigh. She thinks Underneath my feet are wasp stingers and what crunch. All she says \u2013 I will chew her lungs as pretty balloons turn to pretty music.
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\nSoon, elephant summer. The children play in a forest of plums. They drink each other\u2019s birthmarks like sweet bathwater. As the sky fills with wires, the oldest makes a birdhouse of her hair. Remember, the boy asks, when the sky turned to glue and everything else also turned to glue? I remember, the girl replies, when the sky was a light bulb naked and violent.
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\nOnce their children are asleep, the boy chews the girl\u2019s teeth like hard candy full of beeswax. All the hair from his face grows delicate between her legs. He is happiest when this hair moves through his gut. He is happiest when she sewing needles raw muscle.
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\nFever stains grow beneath the children\u2019s skin. Their thoughts jaundiced, their throats ripe from huffing glue. The children are ghost stutter inside their parents\u2019 lungs. Soon, an exit sign\u2019s red light, a chest with no music.
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