Jan Strever

Jan Strever was published in the July 1997 issue
of PoetryMagazine.com and continues to write poetry.
She was Featured Poet in December of 1997.

Cinderella Revisited

I can kill the Prince now.
Death, the old queen,
dressed in her tattered
ball gown has shunned
me once more. A waltz

of Blue Danube was ours,
but we stumbled and fell
into the champagne punch.
She was suspicious, thought
my clubfoot was wooden,

not birth given. How like
my mother she is, her tarnished
crown shy three pearls. She
whirls across the polished floor,
as I fumble to match her pace.

Tosses the corsage over
her left shoulder before
she swirls out the ballroom door.
Leaves me there, dance card
empty, hungering for more.

The Man Who Invented Dishwashers

Must have loved his woman.
Imagine him seated at the kitchen
table, stuffed with roast beef,
oodles of pan gravy, biscuits
and fresh picked strawberries.

He looks up from his plate,
as she rises from her place, picks
up the leavings, the empty goblets,
the bread wiped plates. In a
daze, she wanders to the sink,

begins stacking dishes.
He watches. She runs steamy
water into the pan, her body,
her limbs as fluid as the spill
from the spigot. He notices her

thoughts are not in this world.
Somehow with her hands soapy,
immersed, her gaze out the kitchen
window, she has left him,
the murmurs escaping from

moist lips, the way her hands
move slowly over each spoon,
each knife, the vacant testimony.
The beef in his belly takes
on life. The escaping groan

signals his need to harness her,
to throw her down on the kitchen
floor while she thrashes, wrenched
back from the horizon she visits
without him. His wants his hands

on her hips, thigh-to-thigh,
as he rides her, tames her, for her
to think only of him. He forces
himself from the room. In the den,
he pulls his books from the shelves,

recalls lessons of hydrology.
His forefathers built damns,
to stem the flow, to capture,
to create homes for their women.
Barbed horizons, a relentless goal.

The Woman Who Rides Elephant

Knowing not what to do
with a man who asks only
for a kiss, she climbs
atop the broad backed beast,
watches him from afar.

Too well she knows how air
is forced from the lungs
when feet no longer touch
ground, when the back is
pressed to the earth. Thought
disappears, only the need
thick with heat, to breathe
stirs when a beast mounts,
then leaves. Too often only
wet grass crushed beneath
the behemoth purge remain.

Astride the elephant,
prodded and bruised
by the tusk of his voice,
she watches for both man and beast
on her lonely ride home.

Sisters
For Tracy Renee

One summer, my elder sister, swollen
like a cow, had me come visit her.
Ashamed by her new gaudy shape
and told to call the man who shared
her home brother, I moved awkward
as girl-fat thickened my body,
hair sprouted in places I hid from the sun.
Each day, she who had been my true sister,
moved more ungainly, grunted when she
attempted to sit,laughed
at my daily discomfort with bras.

I was relieved when sent back to my thin
parents; yet, when I arrived, my mother
was not my mother; she had swollen,
smelled of sweat; my father's face
wore a constant smirk: a crazed
adolescent, muttering, "Never too old,
heh,heh," as he patted her fanny when
she labored to walk from room to room.

Heat melted into autumn rains, I escaped
into the parched leaves of Nancy Drew,
Bilbo and Grandalf. And when my father
took her away, I did not ask where,
searched each room for her,wanted a button,
or earring of hers to touch.
Weeks later, she came blazing into the house
as if she had just come back from a summer
by the Mediterranean. He stood behind her,
a squalling package in his arms.

II

They did not prepare me, never even asked
if I wanted one.They presented her wrapped
with pink blankets and ribbons. A sister
they told me--your sister. Gone were my hours
with them. And with my new unwanted hair,
my peared body, I knew why they did not
notice when I left the room. Months later,
friends would visit;"Come look.
She makes perfect motions."

They would gaze, mute with smiles,
but soon wanted to discuss boys,
Beatles, whether Joyce had really
got her period. They reveled in the changes
nature thrust upon them: sunflowers
bursting to bloom.
I balked at their giggles, at nature's
encroachment upon my body. Stopped calling
them, spent hours making her laugh.
Told her stories of a land where people
were thin and little girls never grew up.

III

Danger is in these memories, old floorboards
waiting to be walked upon, sending the victim
through the floor in honest agony. Danger
knowing that as she grew from teen to woman,
I was not there. I was carousing in Fairbanks,
Durango, Telluride, looking for a place to
rest, to recapture that moment, that summer
before I began my wrestle with nature's
omnipresent force. How did she learn to
accept the forced blood, the fragrant must
while I ran from city to wilderness
then back again trying to discover
an answer I couldn't even form with my lips?

Danger when I recall times she needed
phone calls, letters, a place to visit;
I was too busy, flying, dodging, going
from moment to moment in dazed abandon
seeking God, Buddha, any spiritual fix
but only finding solace with Yukon Jack.
Years later, she found me and did not balk;
floorboards creak, still.