DISASTER
by Jessica DePue

Your morning coffee with sidekick croissant
Disappears along with the paper mug,
Plastic fork, your attire, and appetite
Flooded, washed against bodies
Whose coffee, keepsakes, passions, bearings
No longer hold weight against the undertow
So you find yourself on your roof
Waving for help, hoping to be noticed
As infants, elders, and all this shit
Dogs, pasts, futures, existences
Are scrambled and spit out like god
Flicking a knat, picking his tooth
Or something more immediate,
Less empowered and just as baffling as deity
Reclining in the Lazy Boy, popping a beer
Before this frenzied media coverage
Proclaiming "Laura, I think it's the big one,"
Commenting on the poor state of such folk
The neglect and embarressment of a nation
Ruined before any storm ever hit
Luxury of speculation affords disbelief
That is not your brother, your child
Not your mother whose belly inflates
While the rest of her deteriorates
Among the rest of them, is not your land
Nor mine. Can not be, impossible
Must be third world, something lesser
Someone else's spoil, other people's problem
Belonging to some heathen culture
Devoid of identity, nonexistent aside of
Every television channel, newspaper cover,
Person giving blood, money, food, time
Can not begin to pick up the pieces
Of this sordid reality, nightmare
Vomiting the stench of life
Faces forgotten, a semblance of spirit
Perishing and thriving at once
As you dream of floods and strangers
Stranded and trapped in excrement, gunshot,
Rape, disease, animal instinct and discord
Of inexhaustible magnitude while you sleep
Inside a bed far from an astrodome
Wake up sunk beneath an exploding weight
Riveted by a voice asking
What can be done, where on earth
To begin