Susan Isla Tepper is a twenty-year writer and the author of 11 published books of fiction and poetry and 5 stage plays. She has been nominated 21 times for the Pushcart Prize in both fiction and poetry. Her play THE CROOKED HEART concerning artist Jackson Pollock premiered on October 25, 2022 at the Irish Repertory Theatre in NYC. Adapted from an earlier novel, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Another play, LADY IN A POST BOX, co-written with poet and writer Ciaran O’Driscoll, will also premiere in a staged-reading this year, again at The Irish Rep. Her satirical Novel OFFICE was re-printed as a Second Edition. A new Novel will be out in the winter. Susan Isla is a Brand Ambassador for The Galway Review.
http://www.susantepper.com

Death in Multiple Languages

By Susan Isla Tepper
 
But I do know the hour
behind the curtain
blood of Christ
in wine-stained velvet
conceals the confessional
where I kneel— hands
clutched to breast,
his face in profile
too close,
aquiline nose
the rank breathing
anno Domini
smelt through the scrim.
A silence assesses my sins.
Beyond, there’s rustle
of impatience;
people awaiting their turn,
repeated thuds
bibles, likely,
flicked through to kill time
then smacked down
on the dark pews.
Is killing time considered a sin?
I want to call out Sorry!
to them—
God—
Anyone listening
over the steam pipes hiss—
sorry I’m taking so long
sorry for so many things
softly sliding open/shut.
After all, I do have a right
to my time here.
Or should they order us
sick ones thrown overboard
as was common
in multiple languages
going on centuries
during the slave trade.

Jamie Cat Callan is known for her French lifestyle books, mostly recently, Parisian Charm School from Penguin Random House. She is also the creator of The Writers Toolbox from Chronicle Books.
Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, American Letters & Commentary, Story, Sun Magazine and The Missouri Review. She is a recipient of grants from the New York Council on the Arts, the Pen American Center, The Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. She has been awarded residency fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony, Dorland Mountain Artists Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Arts (in Virginia, as well as international residencies in France and Germany).
She has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, New York University, U.C.L.A., the Low Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, Fairfield University and she served as a teaching fellow at Yale University.
Jamie lives in New York’s Hudson Valley on a small working farm with her husband, William G. Thompson, a retired Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist.
Jamie is also an avid photographer. Her first published photographs came out in The Bardian in 1974.