Kol Nidre
My cantor cousin has a leaky valve
like one of those grand old cars
that cruise my neighborhood –
an old 1967 Ford Galaxie, say,
or a 1956 Thunderbird. He started to cough
black exhaust when he wanted to sing.
Show us the scrolls, the sound a sob.
The cantor creates no vault, no dome,
but desert where God hears sorrow surpassed.
Plainsong’s ancestor launches toward heaven
to pull God down, hits the world’s topography,
ricochets back, echo-locating each Jew’s heart
that hollers “Why?” The only answer: absolution.
My cantor cousin told me the brothel
across the alley from great-grandfather’s bar
had a Negro owner, but no Negroes
were allowed as clients.
The Polish whores wouldn’t sleep with them.
Show us the scrolls, let black smoke roll.
I feel my cousin’s voice in my chest.
The cantor’s opera-singing mother
(dead these many years) nods her approval.
© 2025 Jan Steckel
Jan Steckel’s debut fiction collection Ghosts and Oceans came out from Zeitgeist
Press in 2023. 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 creative prose and poetry have appeared in
Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and
elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.
