THREE SHOTS IN THE SNOW

In a frost-bitten city, streets plated in ice and armored egos,
testosterone brigades prowl, badges flashing like cold accusations,
presuming malice in every shadowed glance, every breath that curls—
where none was offered, none ever stirred.A routine morning stutters: brake lights pulse red through swirling snow,
a citation scratched in haste on a frost-cracked clipboard,
a curt nod, a clipped “drive safe,” the day handed back like mercy.
But today, the ordinary bursts into flame.She was the final straw—unwitting, a ghost in the storm—
snapping the camel’s back, bowed beneath weeks of midnight raids,
frustrations heaped high like snowdrifts barricading the alleys.Among these “alpha” enforcers, armored in Kevlar and rage,
disputes dissolve not in words, not in trembling pauses,
not in the shared pulse of humanity—only in the icy math of force.To “neutralize the perceived threat,” conjured from adrenaline fog,
he levels the pistol through frost-veined windshield glass,
barrel glinting under the pale, indifferent winter sun.
Three sharp cracks shatter the frozen air—
muzzle flashes exploding like betrayed stars,
bullets tearing through flesh, splintering bone in her face,
blood blooming in violent crimson sprays across the dashboard,
hot and metallic, steaming in tendrils against January’s chill,
dripping like molten rubies onto cracked vinyl seats.
She slumps forward, eyes locked wide in eternal disbelief,
forehead pressed to the wheel, a final gasp fogging the glass.
He steps back, boots crunching brittle snow,
tells himself through the ringing silence:
“She’s not like me—her blood foreign, her life a footnote.”
Then turns, trots away, holster snapping shut like a coffin lid,
mission sealed, threat erased—literally—from the living earth.We are a nation devouring its own:
neighbors silenced mid-commute, screams swallowed by wind,
poets and mothers gunned down in their trembling cars,
community lights snuffed out one by one, like candles in a gale,
while the pattern is polished, repackaged, normalized
as “necessary,” as “self-defense” carved in stone.
Murder is murder, raw and unrelenting.
Swap the skin tones, the genders, the snow-dusted zip codes—
the horror remains identical, grief a gaping, howling wound.
No Black life is worth less than a white one,
no soul a lesser flame.
No life at all is disposable, tossed like yesterday’s drifts.My friends, beneath the starched uniforms and barbed divisions
we’ve been herded into like branded cattle,
we are woven from the same fragile thread—
veins pulsing the same crimson river,
hearts beating the same thunder—
more alike than the fortress walls built to divide us.
Can the blind just choose not to see?
We are killing each other here—
a slow genocide of humanity,
one trigger pull at a time,
one life erased in the snow.
Trust your own eyes slicing through the blizzard of spin,
your own ears catching truth in the ghostly echoes of those shots.
Reject the one-sided tales shoveled from ivory towers,
piled high like dirty snowbanks.
We will not be gaslit, whitewashed, or bleached
into swallowing the lie that this was justice,
that gut instinct must kneel to scripted narrative.
See it clearly: the real threat was never the driver easing away,
tires whispering over packed ice—
it was the unchecked ego, finger curled on the hair-trigger,
turning a fleeting hiccup into irreversible blood,
frozen forever in the snow’s unyielding white.