GAS Featured Poet: Jan Steckel

 

Jan Steckel is a Jewish, disabled, bisexual poet and writer and a retired pediatrician. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards for LGBT writing. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks(Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative prose and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and elsewhere. She has four Pushcart nominations. She lives in Oakland, California.

Nephthys

 

The coast is toasty today.

Ginny’s in a cool linen caftan,

me in a starry minidress.

We sip iced tea on a brick patio,

eating salmon salads and pastries

while the moneyed WASPS of Santa Barbara

chatter Sunday greetings around us.

 

At the swimming pool, my parents’ neighbor

plans to go to church, then the dog show,

warns me that vaccinations will cause

dementia and infertility. She hasn’t had one

in years, she says, doing bicep curls,

as I try to back away imperceptibly.

 

Getting out of my parents’ apartment

is like escaping a tar pit, everyone asking

me to act like one of the paid caregivers. 

I remind myself that I’m not here

to get my mother into the shower, 

drive my father to the market,

put ointment under my mother’s breasts,

but to unsnarl their taxes, make sure 

Dad doesn’t buy a whole new computer 

just because he can’t remember his password. 

 

Entropy accelerates in their condominium. 

Mom keeps a gradually crumbling statuette

of an Egyptian goddess. First her head

fell off, then an arm. All the plaster bits

lie about her feet, turning to powder,

emblematic of my parents’ minds. 

Kitten Season

The Belgian Malinois slammed her rock-hard skull
into the back fence in pursuit of the Best Ball in the World.
Fractured a board, revealed behind it the open mouth
of a bucket fixed horizontally in a pyramid of debris.
The little tabby we’d seen cat-walking the fence-top
hissed inside and stood her ground against the dog.
Next day she went hunting and we found why:
three wobbly kittens the white-bibbed image of our own tabby
who died last week. The fourth kitten, nearly all white,
a bastard Siamese. Their eyes just beginning to lose their blue.
I don't want another cat, but my brain is neon flashing
BUCKET O’ KITTENS
BUCKET O’ KITTENS
BUCKET O’ KITTENS