Jan Steckel, Poet

East Bay Cinderella

"He wears shoes to bed," his mother said.

"Not his own shoes, or his father’s.

Only my shoes, and his sister’s.

I wouldn’t bother you about it,

Doctor, except that he cuts the toes and heels off

so he can fit his big feet in.

We are going broke from buying shoes."

In a stage whisper, leaning forward, she adds

"His grandmother and I have seen him

Touching himself while he wears the shoes in bed."

God in heaven forgive me

for referring the boy to Psychiatry

instead of sending him, like I wanted to,

to that specialty shoe store on Market Street

where San Francisco drag queens buy

their size twelve stilettos.

In my prayers, I wish someday for him,

the closet of a big-footed Imelda Marcos.

Swallowing Flies

"Just a screening test," his internist said,

And drew some blood, a PSA,

Or Prostate Surface Antigen,

To see if my patient’s organ of lubrication

Was benignly big or cancerously so.

A high PSA polluted his blood,

So the internist ordered a CT scan

To look for mushrooming metastases.

No cancer crawled across the scan,

But at the aorta’s fork,

Where his heart’s blood flowed into his legs,

Was a delta of blood, an estuary

Where should have been two separate streams.

A blood balloon swelled silently, an AAA,

or Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.

I don’t know why

She swallowed a fly.

Perhaps she’ll die.

"It needs to be fixed," the internist said.

"Otherwise one day

When you’re doing your morning pushups

Or taking your daily walk through the woods,

Your bag of blood might burst,

A roseate explosion of pain in the belly,

Killing you like an anvil dropped from the sky."

He sent my patient to a vascular surgeon

To ratiocinate the benefit and the risk.

There was an old lady who swallowed a spider

That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.

Perhaps she’ll die.

The vascular surgeon quoted the annual spontaneous burst rate

And described the engineering feat of fixing the aneurysm:

They would freeze his heart,

Stopping the water’s flow through the aqueduct

Before repair. They would divert the stream

Of his blood through an external pump.

First the surgeon ordered a carotid angiogram

To see how well the blood would flow

Up my patient’s neck to his head

While repairs proceeded below.

There was an old lady who swallowed a bird;

How absurd, to swallow a bird!

She swallowed the bird to catch the spider….

The carotid was partially blocked.

On bypass, the precious flow

Of blood to his brain might peter out.

Before shoring up the widening banks of belly blood,

They would have to ream out that sludgy carotid

To unclog the pipeline to his head.

First, though, they’d ascertain that the main pump

Was strong enough to take the operation:

A thallium stress test, an expedition

To chart the arteries traversing his heart

Like the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

There was an old lady who swallowed a cat.

Fancy that, she swallowed a cat!

She swallowed the cat to catch the bird….

The stress test proving abnormal, they sent him

To the cardiac catheterization lab,

Sliced open a groin vessel,

Threaded in a hollow reed,

Sailed a balloon coracle

Up the delta of his abdominal aortic aneurysm

All the way to the source of the Nile, his heart.

Next they dredged and stented, cleared the silt,

And propped open three of the critically blocked rivers

With balloon angioplasty.

There was an old lady who swallowed a dog.

What a hog! To swallow a dog!

She swallowed the dog to catch the cat….

In the middle of the night the shoring collapsed,

The coronaries closed again,

Substernal pain crushed rock in his chest.

Off we rushed to the operating room,

I, the medical student, like a tugboat guiding his gurney

Through dangerous straits of prematurely closing

Elevator doors.

There was an old lady who swallowed a goat.

Just opened her throat and swallowed a goat!

She swallowed the goat to catch the dog….

Sterilely we draped him,

The luminous ritual,

The sparkling knives,

Him on the altar

At the top of the pyramid.

His friable aorta tore in the junior attending’s shaking hands;

A geyser of blood hit the ceiling, spattering us all.

His heart kept beating in his opened chest

Long after the surgeon had gone to tell his wife he was dead

And the last doctor had left the room.

Crimson drenched the sterile green drapes

And sloshed an inch thick on the floor,

Soaking my sneakers.

After eight hours operating

(Thirty awake before that),

I thought it respectful to stand at attention

Until his heart stopped beating,

To say goodbye. The circulating nurse returned

To collect the instruments,

And saw me, the medical student,

Standing there staring at his twitching heart.

"They sometimes beat like that for hours,"

She gently said. "I’ve seen them beat like that

In a bucket, outside the body, for hours."

I swallowed and nodded. She left.

"Goodbye, Mr. R-----." I left too.

There was an old lady who swallowed a horse.

She’s dead, of course.

Make It Look Easy

Dive from the sky to the black sea-bottom;

tell me you’d follow me to Czechoslovakia.

Leap from the mattress to climb on the bike.

Race down the highway at night with no lights.

Rainwater jets from wheel to wheel:

Death is a story for children.

I could kill you for taking your life in your hands;

I could swear that you glow in the dark sometimes–

like no other man.

Through a Scotch, the afternoon

pours honey on the floorboards.

Blue water behind your head,

rocking in the doorway,

you say,

Life is easy.

No other man….

The Pediatrician's Prayer for Perfection

See how she grabs my finger?

Your daughter is strong, what a grasp!

Look how she roots around for the nipple

when I stroke her cheek.

(Let this baby be as perfect inside as outside.

May her heart murmur be as innocent as she is.

Let her not stop breathing one morning for no reason and,

when her mother picks her up from an extra-long nap,

be already cold to the touch.)

Perfectly normal, that's perfectly normal!

Oh, she only has eyes for her mother, see,

she's looking at you!

(Now that this baby girl is delivered, deliver her from infection,

structural defects, neoplasm, metabolic deficiencies, and

from shaking by the boyfriend who is not her father,

from smothering by her mother who needs mothering herself.)

Your daughter is perfect, absolutely perfect!

(More than anything,

let me not have made a mistake.)

(First appeared in the anthology WomanPrayers: Prayers by Women from Throughout History and Around the World, edited by Mary Ford-Grabowsky, HarperSF, 2003).

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