Author: susanissima

I am one who as a toddler crossing the BIG WATER was so tossed and jostled on a Stuttgart-bound ocean liner that a new verb, bimbam, was created. “No bimbam, Mommy!” In Germany, I watched our housekeeper spill black ink on my mother’s white linen tablecloth, causing cacophonic chaos and also an exquisite Rorschach. These indelible experiences continue to manifest themselves in my love of travel, language and art.

Jasmine Tea

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Back in my early university days in San Jose, somewhere in the mid-Sixties, I lived in a large apartment with an amusing collection of students who shared rent, food and pretty much everything else, and a handful of ragtag couch surfers who had little to contribute but their personal fountains of  idealism and intellectual passion. With that in mind, we began having afternoon salons in our living room.

We sat on cat furred pillows, pizza and wine stained mattresses, and a couple of couches we’d managed to grab cheap from a local thrift store. The couch surfers were responsible for pooling their pennies to buy golden tins of jasmine tea, brewed in whatever clay teapots they could scrounge. When the tea was ready and poured into our rainbow of mismatched cups, a conversation ensued on a topic someone had suggested the day before. Often the depth of the discussion was mind-blowing, life-changing, attitude altering … an exercise we would never forget and that, along with peace protests and trips to the Fillmore to dance to the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, made us who we are today.

I’m delighted to announce that my poem, “Jasmine Tea” has been published in CLOVER, A LITERARY RAG, Volume 15, Summer 2018.