“You can't put your mat there,” said the nice lady. “That's for handicapped people.”
But I'd been promised I could lie down
when I agreed to read.
“How about there?”I asked.

“Oh, no,” she gasped, “Not there.
We're filming. You'd be in the picture.”
“God forbid,” I muttered, grinning evilly,
“that a disabled person should appear
in any of the pictures.”

“Well certainly not lying down!”
she said, “not lying down in public.”

The way she said it, you'd think
I'd asked to have sex in the front of the theater
all through the reading, my legs in the air,
(my favorite position),
the persistent thump, thump, thump
of my pumping and humping
rattling the floorboards and shaking the camera,
my caterwauling cries obliterating
the other poets' readings,
my juices a river flooding the floor
and soaking the shoes of the audience.

I'll lie down on my job, nice lady.
I'll do it on the hand-hooked Turkish rug
at the by-invitation-only living-room poetry salon.
I'll do it on the independent bookstore's hard wood.
I'll get Berber carpet-burns in the library lecture room.
I'll make listeners hear the person next to them breathe.
I'll make your husband unbutton his top button
and loosen his tie. I'll make you,
sitting properly in your chair,
begin to squirm, then writhe and gasp.
I'll wave my round heels
right in front of the camera,
and I'll always be in the picture.

JAN STECKEL is a bisexual activist and a Harvard- and Yale-trained former pediatrician. Over a hundred of her short stories, poems and nonfiction pieces have appeared in print and online publications such as Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Red Rock Review, So to Speak and Redwood Coast Review. Her work has won writing awards and has been widely reprinted and anthologized. Her writing has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize: once for nonfiction and once for poetry. Her poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital is available from Zeitgeist Press. She is currently working on a book-length collection of interrelated short stories and on a collection of short humorous first-person essays. Most of the stories and essays have already appeared in print. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband Hew Wolff.