SPECTACLES

You have to get up close to see the tired
flea fading on a spider’s trampoline,
wrapped up and waiting to be devoured,

or ridges of children’s fingers, splinters 
planted into flesh like flagpoles or trees.
You have to get up close to see the mired

spikes of wood, the torment eating up young 
thoughts. Or concertina wire lining 
a river, whole villages devoured.

Have you seen the Mediterranean
quagmire of refugees, honestly 
gotten up close to see them catch fire, 

clutching their kids on dinghies? Are you sure
you can’t see yourself among them, the sea
tipped upward, waiting to be devoured?

See the oceans igniting, unmooring 
what is mired. Whip splintering freight ships 
through shopping malls and schoolyards. Carbonic 
acid fires—you wait to devour. 




FIRED UP IN 2018

I want to say it’s not normal for a fire to eat a city 
at the rate of one football field’s length 

per second, a hellfire dimming the sun to a stupefied red, 
while we stood in cloud-waste outside City Hall. 

Smoke filled every crack in Northern California, 
but I stayed at the demonstration, fired up—

I thought it was a homeless person’s campfire; 
turned out to be the Camp Fire, which I learned 

from Sarah, the reporter on TV. She said that people 
had burned. I’d thought of the words from the Jewish 

High Holy Days, Who shall perish by water and who by fire?
only a few days before, thinking of the mass 

shooting in Thousand Oaks. It’s a mean thing. 
You wake up to a blue-sky morning, thirty minutes 

later you’ve lost your home or you are dead by fire.  
As I sit at my desk, warmed by lamp and computer, 

squeezing ointment to calm the fire of my arthritic wrist, 
I feel silly in the tight white mask with its little yellow

plastic buttonhole, like breathing through a butthole. 
Sarah the reporter points out a cerulean blue ceramic 

elephant nestled in the ashes of someone’s backyard, 
and as I light a fire under the kettle, she marvels at how, 

even in the colorless devastation of a destroyed community, 
you can still find beauty after fire, like white-tailed deer 

with melted feet nosing through ashes for a few green 
sprigs. Meanwhile, the guy in the White House 

can’t recall the name of the burned town he’s just 
visited as he speaks at a news conference,

and I pray that we will scrape the ashes 
from our soles and no long wonder, 

how many more before our phoenix rises: 
how many floods, how many fires?

________________________________________

Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, Midwest Quarterly, Moon City Review, Pennsylvania English, North American Review, Salt Hill, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of A Doctor Only Pretends: poems about illness, death, and in-between (2022). Abby is a physician in San Francisco, California.