CALIFORNIA FIRES EVERYWHERE

I know morning only by cell phone
held up to the dark beyond the window,
where daylight’s been canceled,
school too. Across the street, kids eat breakfast
Cheerios and milk in soured lighting. I gape,
thinking of bedtime at lunchtime, how cars wear
the gray of old underwear no amount of bleach
can undo. Even the green of the garden
is gray, where hummingbirds are stunned,
and confused bats tire, unsure of when to return
to their roosts. My husband drives to the beach,
his car’s headlights seeking a nonexistent horizon
as the bloody eye of the sun hunts for its betrayers.
He texts me a video of a landmark diner’s electric
sign, its neon red pulsing in the throat
of a furious god that we bed down with
every night, as it whispers us to sleep.

By Abby Caplin

Biography:

Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, Love’s Executive Order, Manhattanville Review, Midwest Quarterly, Salt Hill, TSR: The Southampton Review, Tikkun, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, semi-finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award, finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, and a winner of the San Francisco Poets Eleven. She is a physician and practices mind-body medicine in San Francisco. http://abbycaplin.com