PoetryMagazine.com

Jan Steckel
USA

Jan Steckel’s first full-length poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) won the Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Award. Her chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) won a Rainbow Award for Lesbian and Bisexual Poetry. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Yale Medicine, Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Red Rock Review, Redwood Coast Review and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. 

 

The Wind and the Boy
 
The wind blows in. The wind blows through.
The boy tumbles in like leaves and dirt.
How do you make a tree? Can I play the piano?
What is this? Can I have one?
Can you get me some juice?
It’s a Santa Ana wind, a forest-fire wind.
What are you doing? Working. 
Can you play soccer with me? Maybe later. 
There’s a snake skin on the wall.
It rattles like a diamondback,
but it’s only the wind in the blinds.
A face inserts itself between my computer and me.
Are you making calls for Obama?
Are you working? Am I bothering you?
Are you getting tired of me?
No more tired of you than I could tire of the wind.
The six-year-old fingers the dream catcher
hanging from my reading-rack.
What’s it for? It catches bad dreams
and keeps them away from me.
Do you have bad dreams? I ask.
He shakes his head no.
There’s a scar on his forehead.
He strokes green feathers in the web’s middle.
Are these the dreams? You can’t see the dreams,
I tell him, like you can’t see the wind.
You only see what the wind blows in.
The boy leaves goldfish crackers in couch cracks.
Candy wrappers in the car door. A juice box. 
An acorn. Crayon pictures of monsters.
If your mama pushed you off the bed, he asks,
and gave you a scar, would you still love her?
I don’t know, I say. Would you? 
He shakes his scarred head. 
Wind whips the trees. 
The wind and the boy, 
the boy and the wind.

 

 
First appeared in Street Spirit, December 2008 
Included in The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011)

 

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