Birth
In the dampened corners of the cities,
every car exhales exhaust; every body breathes greed.
The Skull-God is born in human minds,
stirring as a mass of slime; growing up a red snake,
reeking of the ancient beast’s primordial hunger
It swallows the souls of businessmen in tailored suits
and wandering robbers in rags.
It infests skyscrapers from New York to Tokyo,
creeping into hamlets from Cambodia to Vietnam.
The Skull-God unfurls its viscous, moist body,
tasting the hunger for fleshly prey in winter.
Wake
The radicals wave the ever-fashionable banner of “equality”;
their self-righteous sense of justice shadows them,
breeding in cave-darkness, nurtured by the sun’s edge.
Under moonlight, in those private chambers,
hidden hands pull strings behind velvet curtains,
bringing the grave’s chill to the swaying cradle.
The Skull-God wakes here:
from silver tongues in conference rooms,
from muzzle flashes in street gangs.
It towers, spreading its mottled wings,
kissing the dancing snakes inside everyone’s heart,
playing their emotions like marionettes.
Fate
The cities are the maternal core of the urbanites,
birthing serpentine forms. From each soft mouth,
the Skull-God emerges, breathing the glacial morning.
In the ruins, once-blooming flowers and lives
become sculptures of the Ice Age.
Most achieve equality in that moment.
But below, in underground rooms, those with kind hearts
temper steel with willpower blazing like summer,
facing cruelty without flinching.
Among them, the hardworking Black people,
with “Victory” etched on their foreheads;
Asia’s indigenous pregnant women, bearing futures;
retired veterans, forging the cure against the Serpent’s breath.
As singing steel birds rise from the furnaces of their hands,
shatter the dark mark upon the world.
When the Serpent within humanity sleeps at last,
the Skull-God will collapse — sealed at the edge of fate,
entombed in the hive of unnamed heroes.
Yucheng Tao is a Chinese poet and the editor of The Argyle Literary Magazine. He serves as a reader for Palette. His work has appeared in StarLine*, Strange Horizons, White Wall Review, Wild Court, Ink Sweat & Tears, NonBinary Review, and is forthcoming in I-70 Review, North Dakota Quarterly. He has twice received an honorary award from the Dark Poet Club Contest.