Susan Tepper is a twenty-year writer and the author of nine published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent are CONFESS (poetry from Cervena Barva Press, 2020) and a zany road novel WHAT DRIVES MEN (Wilderness House Press, 2019). Right now she’s in pre-production of an Off-Broadway play titled ‘The Crooked Heart’ re-written and adapted from an earlier novel, which focuses on artist Jackson Pollock in his later years.

China

I should have gone
to China with you
to drink the green tea

I know the places
to stretch out prone
beneath crumbling time

uncovering vast cities
and the screams
from charging warriors

forever changing the landscape

unfolding
century by century

the way women
change linen
time and again for the bath