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She isn’t dormant, she moves through the dark in this new phase, as exact as a silver snowflake. Despite her voicelessness, she speaks to me. Her swollen body is idolized in the black that she unstains; she owns the shadows. I live for the night, it rejuvenates my scars; it’s my only pleasure. But she soon becomes entangled in his net of branches, in his labyrinth of wires. The moon-bruise aches in these hands that grasp her too tightly, the constant stroking; her whole existence is fingered blackly. I crackle with his razor touches that hook on to my skin. Each vein sticks to her, emptying her white cup, eating her souring flesh; to you the moon is just a stone, her presence doesn’t haunt you, she is more than my reflection; and I feel myself becoming cold. This struggle makes me scab but the yellow puss still leaks from me. And I am numb with fear. She peeks through the branches like bone in a deep cut, only she never stops bleeding. Her bleached corpse-body aches for freedom, but she is truly caught; her ends fray and we unravel. I wear her scabbing scars too, she is my sister after all. This new phase is exhausting, he wants to lick my skin off. My white body is caustic; it bites me back; I scratch and feel myself flake beneath the nails. I touch the tree and feel its poison enter me. You are my immunity. But I don’t think I can go on. We are septicly whole. She is draining, pouring herself out, as animated as the old skull with its thin layer of skin: its veins pulsating with the starved appearance of Death. I don’t think I’m here anymore either. I am in her bone casket. You know this crippling well; we have both lived with these deformities. I am now in the tree with her. She is now all of my eye, we touch and I am frosted. We are one to the wet core, that stuff that white is made from, and we are each swallowed by his trunk, living inside his chest of ill health.