Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues - Posts Tagged "luminaria"

Halloween is my wedding anniversary. Hew and I went to Luka's Taproom in midtown Oakland to celebrate. Afterward we lit candles in our front window around a sugar skull we bought Sunday at the Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead celebration in the Fruitvale, our exuberant Latino ghetto. A sky gravid with rain (or perhaps the per capita murder rate) kept the usual few trick-or-treaters away this year, leaving us a satellite-dish-sized bowl of Snickers and Milky Ways on the coffee table. The tiny candy bars sing siren songs to me now from the living room, but I'll stop my ears with foam earplugs and lash myself to the headboard.

Several years ago, I wrote this Halloween poem, "Luminaria," for Hew. Valyntina Grenier was kind enough to publish it in her online journal Back Room Live . Valyntina is a talented artist and poet with an MFA in poetry from St. Mary's College of California. She has shown her visual art in solo and group exhibitions in Oakland and Tucson. She curated the Oakland reading series Back Room Live, from which her journal drew its inspiration.

Watching on today's news patients being evacuated from Bellevue Hospital in New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy reminds me so of this poem I wrote after Hurricane Katrina, "Charity after the Hurricane." It's about Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where my grandfather Morris Steckel trained to be a general practioner. The poem was published online by Kemble Scott in SoMa Literary Review and in my first chapbook, The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006).

My heart goes out to everyone in the waterlogged states.

Charity after the Hurricane

Hydrocephalus Boy is doing okay.
His shunt’s the only thing that’s draining around here.
The gomer with the Marines tattoo boxed his beans.
Guy hasn’t peed in two days,
and we got no dialysis,
no power,
no suction,
no lights.
Rick’s sewing people up by flashlight in the OR
since the ER’s an aquarium.
Jeannie’s suctioning green crap
out of the Funny Looking Kid’s trach
with an ear-bulb and a syringe.
Looks like a giant turkey-baster.
Kid’s circling the drain.
We’ve been bag-ventilating the guy
with Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome
since Monday. We take turns.
My hands ache.
No more water to drink, but if you’re thirsty,
I can put in an IV and fill up your tank.
You look like an easy stick.
You want potassium in that, doctor?
Got no coffee, but there’s Ritalin left in the pharmacy.
I sent the derm resident
to salvage some crackers from the cafeteria.
Yeah, I know it’s underwater.
He’s from Harvard.
Don’t they have a swimming requirement there?
He’s gotta be good for something.
Stay out of the east stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors.
That’s where we’re stacking the bodies.
There’s ten feet of water flooding the morgue
and fluid filling up the lungs
of the Little Old Lady in heart failure.
She sounds wet.
She may have made it off her roof,
but she’s drowning from the inside.
Water, water, everywhere.
My throat’s dry.
My lips are cracked.
My knuckles hurt.
We paddled these people across the street in a canoe,
one by one.
We carried them up eight flights of stairs
to the parking garage roof.
We’re waiting for helicopters they told us would be here.
ARDS-man just croaked.
My hands are sore from squeezing that bag.
I kept him alive for four days
and now he’s kicked the bucket on the motherfucking roof
because the helicopters haven’t come.
Little Old Lady’s chest is too stiff to move.
The bag just won’t push it up and down anymore.
She’s toast.
Too much water on the inside,
nothing but water on the outside,
and not even a Diet Coke to drink.
I’m just going to sit down here.
I’m just going to put my head in my hands.
I’m just going to let my shoulders shake.
I’m not crying.
I’m too dry.