Summer 2023: 42, The Fleets Have Marched, Prithvijeet Sinha

I.
The fleets have marched.

Milk trays gone,
shifted towards natal-care wards
asleep in the snow,
shoveled on top of a hill
of artillery
from that last winter.

The women have marched.
Dark Age of contingencies
putting to sleep
the birth of a nation
they brought out
from their provinces.

The men have
gone to the mouth
of the continent,
(it’s both
a saddle and a cannon)
slunk around its bellicose nape,
broken shoulder-blades
and fallen abruptly,
with great shocks of desire,
fallen into
bellies of neighboring districts,
emptying cartridges
in their high-school classrooms.

II.
The fourth wall
flattened
in a white desert
where no solemn summer
arrives from another land,
palanquins become wooded
coffins.
Funeral parlors
mark descendants
for this desecrated Earth.

The fleets have marched.
Bellicose boots on the ground.
Bellicose faces riled
by a bad dream
viewed from cut hatches
and picture windows
washed with
amniotic fluids.

III.
A mosaic of war
is like this.
The fleets march home.
The fleets make their transcripts.
The women watch
provinces of faith
be fathomed
by men;
from their clutches
they valiantly fight
without unclenching
their fists.

In a bellicose world,
half-human,
one-tenth corpse,
full-time citizens
of this comatose republic,
a mosaic of life
is like this.