Indivisible
Separating myself from my parents
is an impossibility.
The imprint of my mother’s hands
will always be on my skin.
Her voice always be in my head,
behind the face that looks just like hers,
between my ears, invasive, cunning,
berating my body, demanding I make myself
smaller, that I subsume my needs to hers,
telling me that to want what I want
is selfish. I must not even let myself
know what I want, my anatomy
is not my own, my atoms belong
to my progenitors. I think of my mother
before that board of 1960s physicians
who had to approve her abortion,
when her doctor testified that carrying
another child might leave her
unable to walk, crippled, dependent,
how she had to get all those strange men’s
leave to evacuate my little sibling,
and I don’t, will never, forgive,
but I understand.
© 2024 Jan Steckel
Jan Steckel left a pediatric practice caring for mostly Spanish-speaking children to
be a poet, writer, and medical copyeditor. She is Jewish, bisexual, and disabled by
chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a
2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist
Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards. 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.
She lives in Oakland, California.
