Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Love’s Executive Order, Manhattanville Review, Midwest Quarterly, Salt Hill, TSR: The Southampton Review, Tikkun, and elsewhere. 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 in San Francisco.
How to Explain
If all she doesn’t know she could say
in a single sentence, she would tell you
about the young man in rolled-up jeans
who pulls a Dungeness crab from the surf
with his rod, inspecting it over
a white bucket as it flails,
how a few audacious sunbathers,
pink and plump as baby mice,
squirm in the chill on colorful serapes
at the base of the cliff,
above which falcons roller-coaster
on headwinds as the young man walks,
then hefts, the too-small-to-keep
crustacean into the surf, her joy at feeling
its release as her own, and the older man
in the red trucker hat leaning back
on a log of driftwood
who grins, holds his penis,
looks back at her.
