Thursday, July 16, 2026: Jan Steckel's "Sea of Ghosts"

 

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.

Sea of Ghosts

Buried ships of San Francisco

sail under a ghost Bay Bridge,

though neither saw each other in life.

In another era, Chinese men

in a bay-side camp watch

ghost schooners sail by.

The laborers eat cockles, mussels,

bite the heads off squid.

Grains of the rice they steamed

run through a giant hourglass.

One old man draws a bow

across a two-stringed erhu.

Another plucks individual rice grains

with lacquered chopsticks, replaces them

in the top bulb of the time-glass.

He’ll never catch up.

Grains spread at the bottom

in alluvial fans that rise slowly

around the hulls of buried ships.

The erhu plays a tune from the Yangtze

long since dammed. Across the Pacific,

under new lakes of the bottled River,

ghost women hull rice and wait

for their men to call them to America.

© Jan Steckel