April 2012

bio

photo by tess. lotta

    Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her latest poetry book is Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, December 2018). 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. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, New Verse News, November 3 Club, 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 won various other awards. She lives in Oakland, California.

Fourteen Crossings

We chose rings of braided gold,
mine red, yours white.
Your sister filled our honeymoon suite
with yellow roses.

When we rumpled the sheets,
I twisted the ring on your finger.
You laughed and said
it felt like I was adjusting your settings.

It was fetish-wear for me,
kindling more lust
than any slipped sheet bend
around my ankle or wrist.

In the rose- and -sex-scented morning,
I found you bent over a sheet of paper,
diagramming your ring.
"Three strands! Fourteen crossings!"

With a topologist's glee,
you mapped the gold intersections.
I laughed at you until you
rose and joined me in the bed.

Like a Dark Age Irish scribe,
bent over his book of knots,
you drew me out
and illuminated me.

(previously published in Red Rock Review)

copyright 2012 Jan Steckel