Dashboard Horus: A Bird's Eye View of the Universe

  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 r...

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. Voyage All night long I’d dreamed of old books, secret rooms, packing trunks. When I got home I drank snakebite chicory, remembered the fifteenth century, when I was a clerk in a ship’s hold. The big blond sailor with the Scandinavian name, I thought we’d burn in hell for what we did but didn’t care. Only ale and grog to drink,  the occasional rain, the cask-water too brackish for anything but washing. Cries of gulls long gone, turtle soup, dry biscuit, a bit of shoe leather called salted beef. Writing was a skill that only I and the captain had.  My Viking friend could break me with one hand. I liked it that way. Time eno...

  Jan Steckel left a busy pediatric practice caring for mostly Spanish-speaking children to work as 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 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. Machetazos Today Benita Miller de Robinson will carry water with one arm. She will cook cassava root and sweet potato and yams in an iron pot over illegally made charcoal. She will clean the house and brush all the dirt out the front door with a homemade broom. She will empty her second-to-youngest son out of the dish-washing tub so she can wash the dishes. She will beat her clothes and t...