I’d probably still be a pediatrician if it weren’t for bad degenerative disc disease that started in medical school. I’ve been in increasing left low back and left leg pain for nearly twenty years. For the first twelve years I had difficulty sitting, so I would stand for shifts as long as thirty-six hours. Now I can’t stand for long either, and I spend most of my time horizontal. I left the practice of medicine in 2001. Now I write fiction, nonfiction and poetry lying flat on my back with my laptop suspended over me in a gizmo my husband made out of wire coat hangers, blue painters’ tape and twisty ties. I have a poetry chapbook out called The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006). My writing has won numerous awards and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. You can find links to my published work at www.jansteckel.com. I still feel that pain has taken away most of my life and crouches around the corner, waiting to steal what little I have left. My entries in the APF Pain and Creativity exhibit are the following three poems from my full-length poetry manuscript, The Horizontal Poet:

Lake Bed

What has this drought bared in me
that took my rationality, and left me
singing madly on the thirsty plain?
The cool glass scientist’s mind recedes.
As mud cracks dry, shattered pots and bones heave up,
innocence, whimsy, and the virginity I misplaced
in 1979. The broken hull of my originality,
sunk in anhydrous clay, its snapped masts splintered.
The rusty keys to my 1967 Ford Galaxie
with the 400-cubic-inch V8 engine,
bench seats made for making out,
and automatic on the column.
My idealism, that held a malnourished infant
on my knee, and posed for photos:
tarnished, but intact! The corset stays
that pushed my tiny breasts up
fifty pounds ago and fabricated cleavage.
Encrusted coins of some forgotten realm,
that rained into my lap; I should have kept
my knees together. Unrealized motherhood.
Lust that led me, if not into adultery,
then into accessorizing for the crime.
My fractured fibula, radius, ulna,
and laminae rongeured out of my spine
like cracking crab. Fragments of ambition.
Unstrung instruments I can no longer play.
A lens-less microscope, knobs all fused.
Mastery, competence, independence evaporated:
what’s enlightened by the desiccating sun
is all the wreck of me.

Light Draws Fire

Pain’s the goad
to an exhausted jade.
Coleridge lied,
or else she’s not a poet
opium inspires.
Her it just addles.
Better to count
the small hours
of another all-nighter.
If she lies very still
below the red miasma
it might forget she’s there.
Lights out,
not even a cigarette.
No spark,
or the bolt cracks,
and off she gallops,
sweat-covered ribs heaving.


A Sense of Release

Think she’s unstable,
the wild-haired, bloodshot-eyed
woman with cane
whose rate of decay
and pain’s radiation
mean a short half-life?
Hazard a guess
if it’s mind or dark matter.
Solid states of denial
can’t shield her now.