Les Adieux

after Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí


Frank eats breakfast beside her, vitamins
clattering from their bottles. Audible swallows
of water cause his eyelids to twitch.
She pushes him from her red suitcase,
folds her clothes into it. His panic grows—
he begs her not to leave him, follows her
downstairs and outside, but she refuses to stay.
She turns the key, Frank feeling ill as he watches
her leave it under the reclining woman. Stay!
Please,
he says, and without shame throws
himself at her feet. She strokes his whiskers
with her thumb, distracts him with the flickering
blue-greens of foliage, the flash of a magpie.
The tempo of her movements increases as she gathers
her things, checks her watch, melts into a taxi.
Pulling away, she sees him shrinking through glass.
Then Frank leaps from his porch into her echo.

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About the Author

Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, Midwest Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, North American Review, Salt Hill, 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.

Abby Caplin
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