OUT OF SERVICE

by Jan Steckel

Ghost cars with their lights still on, 
radios blaring, windows shattered,
litter the streets. It's like the rapture, 
drivers disappeared. Alex Pretti's
beautiful baritone talks about service,
sacrifice, freedom that isn't free.
He's reciting his own epitaph,
just doesn't know it yet.
Boy Scout, choir boy, runner, biker, 
named his dog Joule after a unit of energy.
Someone needs to immortalize him
in a song, like Joe Hill. I'm tired
of snuff videos featuring our best
and brightest. Bone-weary
of tinpot dictators, bantam Nazis 
in custom greatcoats. Alex was a lover
who was loved, cared for people,
made them laugh. Now he's meat.
The pathologist will crack his chest,
weigh his heart, find it lighter 
than a feather. Joe Hill tells Joule,
"Hear that? He's coming."
All the ghost cars flash their lights
in time to the whistles and shots.

Ghosts and Oceans, Jan Steckel's latest book, is a collection of short fiction. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet won a Lambda Literary Award. Her books Like Flesh Covers Bone, Mixing Tracks, and The Underwater Hospital also won awards.

THE NEW NOVEMBER

by Jan Steckel

for Garrett Murphy

 

Late October is the New November,

the nova ember, when all slates

are made new. Ladybug, ladybug,

fly away home, your statehouse is on fire.

If you can’t vote the bastards out, 

drag along your electoral hammers,

spousal skull-crushers. Surveil those 

ballot boxes through the sights 

of your AR13s, only wear masks 

when you’re Ku Klux Klanning.

Proud Boys will be bashers.

It’s the ballot-harvesting festival,

so let’s go smashing pumpkins.

MAGA MAGA make it rain, it’s

lefty-hunting season again.

Kristallnacht’s in fashie-fashion.

Jack-o-Lannister, slide down

the Capitol bannister.

Olly olly oxen free!

Open season/no more reason:

civil discourse is passé,

democracy’s so yesterday.

Grab your billyclubs, shillaleghs, 

flagpoles, sheriff’s star,

little red baseball cap.

It’s mass grave o’clock, wake up, 

smell the decomposing bodies.

Get up off your brass knuckles—

Let the midterms begin!

Jan Steckel’s book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California. 

COON CAT TUESDAY

by Jan Steckel

Nick Anderson

Sunny sweats on her stoop,

says she’s seen raccoons and cats

mating in her backyard. They’ve bred

a tribe of unholy hell beasts,

coon cats, who haunt the bushes.

She also says we shouldn’t call the cops

if her ex violates the restraining order again.

She doesn’t know whose blood

stains the street today,

the woman gunned down in front

of Carlos’s taco truck. Helicopters

roar overhead, caution tape and wagons

cut off our exit from the block for hours

as officers snap photos, pick up shell casings.

People carry out chairs to sit and watch.

The children are all walleyed and gabbling:

¡Pistolas! ¡Policía! ¡Ambulancia!

Everyone has Covid, except those out

dodging bullets. In Texas, someone shot up

a school again, but that seems far away.

Jan Steckel’s book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California, USA.

ELECTION NIGHT AFTER DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS

by Jan Steckel

A blazing stateroom of clapping blondes. 

The President dropped the match. The windows 

blew out like a thousand Kristallnachts.

 

My husband slept through the little Hiroshima.

In the morning we’d have to pour into the streets.

I tried to curl up like the cat and snooze.

 

But voices whispered, “Anyone can march. 

Take up your pen. Write an anthem we can

sing again.” Dead poets filled my bedroom.

 

Victor Jara lifted broken hands.

García Lorca slid down a bullet-riddled wall.

Mandelstam starved and shivered in a transit camp.

 

My dead friend, Berkeley poet Julia Vinograd,

read new poems in my dream, turned to me. 

“Open your mouth,” she said. So hear me:

 

Tomorrow some will march, some write, 

and others sing. Though glass and bone shatter,

America will never bear another king.

Jan Steckel’s book Like Flesh Covers Bone won 2019 Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California.

AMERICAN PLAGUE

by Jan Steckel

“Bug Bell Jar 3” Color Screen Print on 250gsm Stonehenge by Emma Wiesenekker

Ensconced in my 1926 paint-peeling
clapboard-rotting Oaktown bungalow
on the eleventh day of George Floyd
I-Can’t-Breathe marches, three months
into COVID-19 Bay Area lockdown.
Ate the last big-pharm pain pill.
Looters hit our CVS, so I’m texting
photos to GreenRush Cannabis Delivery:
driver’s license, medical marijuana card,
a postmarked envelope to me myself,
so they’ll hand-deliver me CBD balm.
Those dudes are intrepid: not rain
nor snow nor sleet nor tear gas. I could just
handshake-buy shake from the boys
hanging out unmasked in front
of the Korean liquor store all day,
but I’m trying to preserve that fragile
lung tissue, don’t want to aggravate
my alveoli, because I’m high-risk
four different ways. I no longer
venture out of my crib, just click
click click my thumbs while humming
"We Shall Overcome" to the rhythm
of flash bangs and helicopter blades.
Once I marched for Black Lives Matter.
Now I’m a bug in a bell jar launching
bucks through the ether at bail funds.
My hair grows in wavy and gray.
For exercise I prune deadfall,
clear long grass and blackberry vines
from the  backyard fence,
waiting for fire season to spark,
black smoke to roll. Oh Lord when
will we all be able to breathe?


Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her latest poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, December 2018) is a finalist for poetry in the Bi Book Awards. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, TheNewVerse.News, November 3 Club, Assaracus and elsewhere.

ANOTHER GUATEMALAN CHILD

by Jan Steckel

A 16-year-old boy died Monday at a Border Patrol station in Texas, becoming the fifth child from Guatemala to die since December after being apprehended by US border patrol agents. —Yahoo! News, May 21, 2019. Photo: People hold a vigil for migrants who have died, have been detained and deported by US authorities, near the US-Mexico border fence in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, on May 3, 2019 (AFP Photo/Guillermo Arias via Yahoo! News).

With the name, they release
a face, a family, a story,
but not a living child.

Five dead kids in five months.
Only half the migrants
are from Guatemala,

but all the dead children are.
What are the odds?
(1/2)5 or 1 out of 32.

Are they sicker?
Poorer? More fragile?
Indigenous? Dark?

Did they beg
in Mayan tongues,
so pleas were ignored?

In the hospital.
In the ICU.
Alone in his cell.

Pneumonia. Influenza.
She died of a fever,
and no one could save her.

By Stephen Miller’s bed,
small ghosts cry
for their mothers.

Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her latest poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, December 2018) is a finalist for poetry in the Bi Book Awards. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, TheNewVerse.News, November 3 Club, Assaracus and elsewhere.

BY THE RIVER

by Jan Steckel

“Happy is he who takes your little ones

and dashes them against the rocks.”

—Psalm 137:9

By the waters of the Rio Grande
our hands were cuffed,
our children taken.

We didn’t know in Bohemia’s Terezin,
Theresienstadt was a model camp.
Propaganda film: a Jewish orchestra
before it went up in smoke.

We’d heard Argentina
stole babies for barren
military couples, dropped mothers
from helicopters into the sea.

Tornillo in the Texas desert:
white tents pitched overnight.
Drone-photo of boys marched in lines.
Journalists not allowed inside.

In jail I got a receipt
for my wallet, but none for my son.
By the Rio Grande,
I lay down and wept.


Jan Steckel's poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus, and elsewhere. Her work was nominated three times each for the Pushcart and Sundress Best of the Net anthologies, won the Goodreads Poetry Contest three times, and earned various other awards.

TUFF SHED CITY

by Jan Steckel 

It's been exactly one month since the city of Oakland constructed Tuff Sheds to try to house at least some of the city's growing homeless population. . . . During that time, the city has moved out virtually all the tent encampments around them. "We're at 85 percent capacity," said Joe DeVries, an assistant to the city administrator, which runs Oakland homeless outreach program. He says there are only six spaces left in the Tuff Sheds at 6th and Castro. "I guarantee you it's better than a tent," said DeVries. "These things don't leak when it rains. You've got a hard structure. You've got a locking door. It isn't perfect, but its certainly a step up from where people were." In the meantime, the city kept its promise to clean out most of the tent encampments that engulfed the area...leaving former residents with no choice but to move on -- or move in, to the sheds. "It's a good step toward a new life," said Hill. The city admits, this approach isn't perfect and stresses it's meant to be temporary. The goal is to find permanent housing for each resident within six months. —abc7NEWS (Bay Area), June 4, 2018. In the video, Gary Nash offers his version of what goes on at the Tuff Sheds site on 5th and Castro—bullying, inhumane conditions, prison-style rules. His Mom Robiyn has been keeping peace and caring for folks at this community but now the people in power are trying to evict her and Gary who both have medical issues.  —San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, May 28, 2018.

 “we the former tenants of San Francisco  / dead in jail sleeping under the freeway / out here somewhere / between Stockton and the grave” 

—from “Bang Bang Niner Gang” by Cassandra Dallett

She changed bedpans twenty years at Kaiser Hospital
in Oakland, but the property management company
evicted her for day-late rent so they could double it
for tech workers forced out in turn from San Francisco.
She ran out of her pain meds, started stealing fentanyl
from patients, got fired and banned, now sleeps
in a tent by the railyard, shoots up to deal with it,
trades blow jobs for her supply.

He drove the bus in a twelve-hour shift
until ride-sharing took over and his line shut down.
He got laid off, couldn’t find new work at his age,
lost his home in the housing crash.
He’s in a tent in a sidewalk camp now, where
people keep getting hit by cars at the off ramp.

He supervised parking lots, but his back went to shit,
the insurance cut off the pills, and he started drinking
again to kill the pain. His wife kicked him out.
He cleaned windshields at the corner gas station,
slept under the freeway, got robbed,
still thinks it beats the shelter.

They drove a truck for a queer-owned grocery
until Amazon Fresh drove it out of the market.
They squatted in a condemned warehouse
with other nonbinary people and artists till
a space heater and a tangle of extension cords
burned the place and its queer spirit to the ground.

All of them ended up in a West Oakland tent city
where neighbors emailed City Hall daily
demanding their removal. One night
someone set the tents on fire.
Now the City’s herding them into plastic
gardening sheds that used to be for storing
rakes and lawnmowers. Broken tools, all of them.

Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work was nominated three times each for the Pushcart and Sundress Best of the Net anthologies, won the Goodreads Poetry Contest three times, and won various other awards. She lives in Oakland, California.

STREETS OF RIO BRAVO

by Jan Steckel

A Border Patrol agent shot and killed a woman who had crossed the border illegally near Laredo, Tex., on Wednesday after the officer came under attack, federal authorities said. —The New York Times, May 24, 2018. Photo: A border fence in Laredo, Tex., not far from where a Border Patrol agent fatally shot a woman on Wednesday who the authorities said had illegally crossed the border. Credit: Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times.

As I walked out on the streets of Rio Bravo,
As I walked out in Rio Bravo one day,
I spied a body all wrapped up in Mylar,
Covered with Mylar, as cold as the clay.

I saw by ICE milling that she was a migrant.
Marta Martinez was filming that day.
Marta Martinez, she held up her cell phone,
Yelled at the agents who murdered the girl.

Why are you maltreating them?
What have they done to you?
You shot that girl, she yelled,
Now she’s lying there dead.

We only tased her, claimed one of the ICE men.
Tased her! snorted Marta. You shot her!
She’s lying there stone cold. She attacked us,
Said the ICE men, with blunt objects.

What blunt objects? demanded Marta,
As the ICE men dragged three campesinos
Out of the trees and into their wagon.
Plastic water bottles? I don’t see any rocks.

They were running from you when you shot,
Cried Marta in anger. She’s somebody’s daughter,
Sister, maybe mother. It’s hard to tell how old
She was with half her face shot off.

Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
Play the dead march as we carry her along.
Down in the green valley, lay the sod over her.
She was a young migrant they said had done wrong.


Jan Steckel was a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician who took care of Spanish-speaking children until chronic pain persuaded her to change professions to writer, poet and medical editor. She is an activist for bisexual and disability rights who lives in Oakland, California. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work won the Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest, a Zeiser Grant for Women Artists, the Jewel by the Bay Poetry Competition, Triplopia’s Best of the Best competition, and three Pushcart nominations.

HURRICANE SEASON

by Jan Steckel 

Poster by Rusty Ford

The mercury was in triple digits, the moon
ocherous with smoke, cities submerged.
An orange gibbon necklaced in skulls
drop kicked brown-skinned Americans
over borders, polkaed over illegal bodies.

We sandbagged against the Klan,
stored water for dousing crosses,
hoarded fuel to flee Brown Shirts.
Cyclones whirled clockwise
south of the equator,
widdershins in the North.

We covered windows with plywood.
Black Bloc buffeted the downtown.
We all renewed our passports.
Churches built secret shelters
for the undocumented.
It was too late to evacuate the States.

We sheltered in place,
hunkered and braced for
depressions and disturbances.
A brassy trumpet’s wall rumbled up.
The Daily Stormer surged.
The Republic came tumbling down.

Jan Steckel was a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician who took care of Spanish-speaking children until chronic pain persuaded her to change professions to writer, poet and medical editor. She is an activist for bisexual and disability rights who lives in Oakland, California. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work won the Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest, a Zeiser Grant for Women Artists, the Jewel by the Bay Poetry Competition, Triplopia’s Best of the Best competition, and three Pushcart nominations.

CHARLOTTESVILLE 8/11/17

by Jan Steckel

Several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists were met by a small group of counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson on Friday night at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. 

—The Washington Post, August 12, 2017

O my America!
What are these phosphors
borne in the hands of men
wearing polo shirts and swastikas?

The pastor flees her church.
She hasn’t seen Klan with torches
since she was five years old.
Here they stride with baseball bats,
dressed like college students
or fresh from the boardroom.
She fears for the black man walking
alone the streets of her town,
where bands of predators roam.

“Blood and soil,” they chant.
”White lives matter.”
”You will not replace us.”
”Jews will not replace us.”

Where are the streets of gold
my great-grandparents came looking for?
Now it’s blond men who brandish flambeaux
surrounding a circle of antifascist students,
hands joined around a monument,
facing outward against the slavering pack.
The Nazis throw their torches,
mace the kids. Afterward a girl
tweets that she’s safe,
but she’s not okay.
Where is the God in whom she trusted?
Out of the many, where is the one?

Charlottesville, tonight the dream
of a shining city on a hill
shatters into points of light
marching along your occupied streets.

Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who left the practice of medicine because of chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards for LGBT writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. 

THE FALL

by Jan Steckel

Tamir Rice memorial. Source: NBC News.

I don't want to be Joan of the Narrative Arc here,
wielding my flaming sword of story to drive you out
of my personal bleeding-heart-liberal paradise, BUT
here's a prompt: write a poem using the words
grant, bell, garner, brown, ford, and rice.
Employ a light touch, no sing-song or doggerel.
No sentimentality, please. No rants.
Attention to form but not formality.
Invoke all the senses. Let me see, hear, feel
what the twelve-year-old saw, heard, felt
waving that BB gun around the park.
The gold and orange leaves of Cleveland.
The smell of them rotting in rainwater.
The black-and-white pulling to the curb.
The crack. The pavement rushing up.


Jan Steckel's poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, The Bellevue Literary Review, Yale Medicine, American Journal of Nursing, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere.