ABSTRACTIONS By Susan Isla Tepper

                for Simon Perchik (1923 – 2022)

While you lay dying

my left ear bled

abstractions

streaking the pillow

— you’d unearth a poem

were you able

Day after I woke to

red filling the white

of my right eye

— both sloshed its river

But when the limb

entwined

crashed down

what was left to feed the other.

Susan Isla Tepper is a twenty year writer in all genres. Her stage play "Crooked Heart" will be featured in Origin Theatre Company 'May Play Festival', NYC.