NOVEMBER 2006 I out in the mountain: 2: The Underwater Hospital Enter the lllnrld of ”tnmpnssinnute Conservatism” REVIEW BY MERRY GANGEMI 0 read The Underwater Hospital is to enter a world that many in America choose not to acknowledge, let alone read about. But for those who do want to know, The Underwater Hospital is an important addition to the landscape of pro- _ test against current American public policy. The poems bear witness to the brutal consequences of every single administra- tion since that B-movie cowboy Reagan slid ir1to the White House. Steckel’s work challenges the hypocrisy of “compassion- ate conservatism,” an idiomatic smoke-. screen for greed, indifference, and cruelty. In “Three Little Sisters,” the physician- poet struggles against a recurring night- mare: The three little Salazar sisters from Sali- nas come crestfallen into my bedroom some nights, all crying with rotten teeth and gum ab- _A scesses. The younger two are California-born. I give them antibiotics and send them to a Medicaid dentist so the infections won’t spread to their jaw or brain. ' For the eldest, eight years old, I can do nothing, because she was born in Mexico so doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. I prescribe extra medicine, knowing the mother will split it between all three little girls. I send them out crying. Night after night, I curse and ask, ’ what kind of country denies an eight-year-old girl relief from pain like that because she was born ,on the wrong side of the border I from her sisters? In “Dios 1e bendiga,” the narrator evokes the desperation of the mother’s guilt and self-loathing because: I pretended to be sick , and stayed home from church.... My.uncle came by drunk from a lost cock- fight. He raped me in the kitchen where I had made cactus candy with my mother and sisters. Here is a mother whose child was born with syphilis, a mother who is damned by Catholicism and its embedded misogyny, but a mother grateful for the care that, at ' the very least, cured her baby of syphilis. Here they are, woman to woman, doctor to patient, equals in the desperation of social and cultural systems that perpetuate pain. Jan Stecl O r: a. who visited her in the squalor of the Lower East Side. Dressed in black, the maiden aunts bent and kissed her eight-year-old head saying, “Never forget, Selma, you are one of the heher menschen. ” you’re one of the higher people, a gentlewoman....What they meant was, you come from a long line of ten chief rabbis . 4 of the city o_fRqjga,_ The Underwater Hospital Your grandfather wrote a treatise on Mai— b)’ Jan 5t°Cl<°l monides $5 from Zeitgeist-Press that is in the Library of Congress. San Francisco 2006 Your family, the Widow Romm and Sons, is the largest publisher of Yiddish books in Eastern Europe.... She dreamed of the last Rabbi of Riga, turning from the door of the gas chamber, as he shepherded his congregation in. Beyond him, her two old-maid aunts clutched each others hands and stared past the Rabbis shoulder, and I will never be able to shut that hatch again. » Maybe not, Jan Steckel, but that is why this book is so imperative: because you remember and you feel and you teH the truth about what it was you saw, and heard, and know.V Pushcart-nominated writer Jan Steckel, MD, is a bisexual activist and a Harvard- and Yale-trained former pediatrician. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic and cared for Spanish-speaking families in California at a county hospital and at a large HMO. In 2001, she left the practice of medicine to write full—time. Clearly, Steckel has never forgotten and will never forget: the elderly female patient with dementia, whose nephew had raped her though we refused to recognize Carmen with her box of chocolates inviting me onto her bed to watch Puerto Rican girls mud-wrestling on late night black-and-white hospital TV, ...Old women with rose petals strewn around their hospital beds die ‘alone. A transplant from New Jersey, via San Francisco, Merry Gangemi is the host of Woman-Stirred Radio, a GLBTO music/interview format show at Goddard College that airs every Thursday from 4-6 pm on WGDR 91.1 fm or www.wgdr. org. Merry lives in Woodbury with her partner and spouse, Elizabeth Hansen. They share four children and two A woman kisses her baby . to show me how much she loves him after she has broken all his limbs... 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