On the sugar bowl, the goat is still laughing on a green hill.
A weak flame wings me to the spirit side
of my Newburyport childhood, sucking on button
candies and cubes of maple sugar.
Woke up this morning and cut my foot on ice.
The midnight-blue gingham dress is missing.
Stems in the stockpot for the family. No time
for the intimacy of looking outside and feeling
alone. What was so important last night that I was sure
I would remember? Got such bad frostbite
we didn’t know our toes
had caught fire. Stupidly, we chose
the Hastings Cutoff. A gray, weeping fog.
You must promise to love your body like your dog.
Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Moon City Review, Mudlark Flash, Pennsylvania English, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, a semi-finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award, 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.
Header Art: “The Donner Party” by Vincent Decourt, ShareAlike 4.0 International