Tuesday, August 9, 2022: Jan Steckel's poem "Queen of Sheba Market"

 Queen of Sheba Market

In the turquoise-painted bodega in Samaná,

you could get enough beans for one meal,

a dollop of tomato sauce, a pinch of cilantro,

a piece of an onion. Everything aliquoted down

to the atomic amount, the very smallest portion

that could be priced.

Because who had enough money for the whole can

of tomato sauce, the whole onion, the whole pound of beans?

You could get two aspirin folded into a piece of brown paper.

You could get the news of just that day,

told to you in snatches of broken narrative,

overheard, secondhand.

In the hot-pink hand-painted bodega in Oakland,

you could get a whole can of beans already cooked

and seasoned. You could get a frozen pizza

and a Dos XX or a Modelo Negro or a cold Pepsi 

or a dozen different brands of filtered cigarettes. 

You could get pulled out of the bodeguita by a man,

who took the stroller from you with the kid in it

and wheeled it calmly to the child’s grandfather,

who took the baby inside the apartment building, 

while the man returned just as calmly and began hitting 

you methodically, in a business-like way,

until you were dripping in tears and blood,

and you would both have disappeared 

before the police called by the white woman arrived.

There are bright bodegas everywhere.

There are pale-skinned women calling the police

but too afraid to get out of their cars

everywhere.

© 2022 Jan Steckel

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.