William Ward Butler
Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis
Every morning I take a pill
manufactured by a company
named after a Biblical land
so I can avoid a plague
that zealots say is punishment
for sins I have committed—
so what, who hasn’t defied Leviticus,
who has lived exactly how others expected them to,
why won’t God stop watching me through my webcam
when all the angels are asphyxiating themselves for Jesus,
why do I care what people say about me in brightly-lit churches,
wearing their finest clothes on a holy day?
Yes, I have wanted to be remade in the image of another man.
Yes, I know what history did to those who came before me.
I’m aware the medicine I take daily is the closest I’ve come to prayer:
patented, made for profit, distributed thirty years after the start of a crisis.
If there is an almighty voyeur above us, if they could end suffering
at a moment’s notice, what does it mean that an amoral company did it first?
When I place the pill on my tongue it is nothing like a Eucharist—
it is not a miracle from God, it is proof of God’s absence.
William Ward Butler is a writer and educator from Northern California. His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Bodega Magazine, Hobart, and other journals. He is a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Catamaran Writing Conference, and the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. He tweets: @WilliamWButler
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