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Susan Isla Tepper has been a writer for twenty-plus years and is the author of fourteen published books of fiction and poetry, and seven stage plays. She writes in all genres, with stories, poems, interviews, essays, and opinion columns published extensively worldwide. CLANDESTINE, her stage play about food obsessions and disconnect in a long-term marriage, will go up for a full run in a red barn theatre, off, off, bdwy. Her latest book is a novella titled Girl Upside Down, from Wilderness House Press.

Susan Isla Tepper

BOILING POINT

The sauce simmers
to the boiling point
smelling burnt
at the bottom
Neither reduces the flame.
One tired tree
in a dull forest
calling to another
There is close
and there is captivity.
No sunlight
to lead us forward
this time
on the overgrown path.

— Susan Isla Tepper

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