Soon they will take the blue mask off your face.
Soon they will unzip your thickening blood.
The only bible on hand is Reader's Digest
and I study, 'The Latest Medicine' 'Drama in Real Life':

A man walks forty miles after being mauled by a bear.
I am Joe's Lungs. Caught
in her fractured car, a woman lasts a week on two potatoes.
I am Jane's Esophagus.

Soon they'll take to pricking your toe with a ballpoint pen.
Then they'll hand me that pen and ask Sign here, please.
And here. Over and over
I read about Johnstown in 1889—ten inches of rain

dropped in one day. As a dam bulges,
there's always someone on duty to look to the valley.
He sees what will follow: the stone bridge that'll collapse
and pulverize rail cars, the ironworks fated

to crown people in barbed wire as they burn.
Soon they will tell me We only receive what we can bear.
There's always someone whose job is to ring the alarm,
but be honest: there's no plan for sixty feet

of hungry water. There is only a line of someones,
heaping dirt on the breaking point. We try to fill
the belly of a flood with our little buckets.
Soon everything will be a swallowing.