by Abby Caplin
AI slips into my personal emails, a spying
Big Brother, peering over my shoulder. Last fall, money
circled
down the drain, in what might be our last election.
Eight years, I guzzled the news. Now I sip and worry how “Dt” might get
flagged by Em’s tentacles, if not weirdly written.
Google renames the Gulph.of.MeXicoh to the Gulph.of.AmeRikaH, our maps
hijacked by data centers in Dallas. Institutions,
international alliances, even lowly pennies have not been spared. My neighbor
Jenna, a vibrant woman with twin two-year-olds, was laid off last Friday by Dt/Em’s
kangaroo government. AI sums up what’s inside my email:
Letter of Rejection from The New Yorker; Ruth had surgery; Abby offers advice on
medications. My mother always told me to
never underestimate the stupidity of the American people.
Oh, how she was right! I rewatch
Pride and Prejudice where a wealthy man learns from a strong female lead, so
quaint, and You’ve Got Mail, where a
revenue-oriented man’s heart is softened by a trusting,
spirited woman, but not enough to not destroy her livelihood.
Tr
Ump will someday be laid out, like Savonarola, upon his bonfire of the
vanities. But for now, I should watch
what I write, for the mighty egos,
extracted from the ashes of the Third Reich, are celebrating their carnage,
yucking it up in private jets. Congratulations, Na
Zis, though you too will fail.
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, 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.
