Airbnb in Joseph, Oregon
Abby Caplin
Airbnb in Joseph, Oregon
By the side of the road, a charred truck
advertises chiropractic adjustments.
Cows graze behind a yellow sign
picturing smoked meats. It seems someone
is always burning. Even in these tinderbox fields
you can find the next kindling
being born. Clapboard homestead,
a wicker chair idling on the porch, its cushion
impressed with the owner
I haven’t met. Up north, she waves her sage
in a crowd. Here, under her eaves, a woodpecker
telegraphs what we cannot hold—
human pulp in a ditch, moans of the living,
six thousand children carried on the wind.
Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, Moon City Review, Salt Hill, Tikkun Magazine, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry 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. www.abbycaplin.com