There is a vengeance in the snow that my ancestors forgot to melt

and

now it is my turn to tell you how to burn ice

by Shalini Singh

Glass brittle people prayto a stone watched by guards guns in towers that pinnacle

in a bulletproof vest of a soldier,a steel heart pumps solid.single hair on his chin and three on his pubes signaling the non-eligibilitiesa year late and- now all the pelters have grown up graduating into killers, murderers,terrorists, and slayers. Some, sophomores in sadism.

At night, I slowly watch the snowfallin the light of the lampshadecry ghost when it flickers

five times too slowly.I call the murky gods rooted highto give not my feet black snow beneath to break bonesin a spatter sputter cry. To freeze my eyelids not when the black snow buries seven feet faster than my hands can whipfrostbite in late Januarywhen no crusty birds want to die.

Blood cannot mix with snow and the patterns are not pretty awash in ugly. The truce of the bodies fly’s solitary in conjunction and a retrograde.You must not ask your father.Or his father aboutmothers and their mothers for they might never recover.

Raining as it should, your face is tear-maskedcharcoal eyes burning fever of a hundred and a four. Soon, a cemetery in kind.

Crows have been fasting in an abandoned toolshed in a monastery filled with filthy monks

that raped women who prayed at their feet andraped their gods and the courts denied reparations.

Now, everyone that was denied everything inforesight is blind with spite. They all walk with crows that shine like gutter oil andoiled battered onions pucker in deep fry, together they cry in unison and the cries areheard in ears chartered in all corners.

The filth is old, heard, old.

Crows existed even before. Before there were some of us and most did not care.

They did not carefor the gold on the trees was hanging by the threads of a fortune teller’s whiskers

as he drank whiskey and later in the light, the village was awakened by the cries of the women who were raped

by monks, filthy.Monks that wore string cheese white and they finished red. Red would be black.

If you had to wait, the black was crestfallen into surrender and the hands would paint into the

handheld heart of a small body wreathing in a county jail.The jailer says he knows of a god that

can kill rapists in their sleep. The warden grieves that suicide is not an option. That options canrun into tragedies if not pleasured by a knife and a baton or bougie loin kinky comrades.

9. There is a vengeance in the snow - 杰