In the Sixties, in the not-so-swinging suburbs, an artist moved into a basement apartment. He stunk of oil paint, and some unfamiliar funk. Marijuana, my mother said. Marijuana was something hippies smoked, and I loved all things hippies. I loved the high school girls promenading past our house in tight knots, daisies sprouting from ponytails. Loved their tough friends too, proud girls in packs, hair teased high, busy with its own personality. I knew hippies were good, sensed it in my soul. So I wasn’t surprised that even after the summer, after no one invited the artist to a softball game, or offered a charred burger at a barbeque, he showed up with a battered box of oils, at the door of a neighborhood girl—awkward, unfriended—and painted an enormous rose on the cast of her broken leg, a petaled planet blooming.

Tina Barry’s

poetry and short fiction can be found in American Poetry Journal, Gone Lawn, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Maryland Literary Review, Nasty Women Poets anthology, ONE ART, Rattle, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and TBSF 2016, The Fourth River, trampset, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has several Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. Tina is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.

Author’s website: TinaBarryWriter.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Inside the amazing brains of Laura Rodley, Tina Barry, & Robert Slais by Big Table Publishing in Boston Literary Magazine (February 2023); includes Tina’s poem “Lilies”

⚡ Beautiful Raft: An Interview with Tina Barry by Hannah Grieco in Empty Mirror (28 February 2020)

⚡ “A Friend’s Daughter Dies” by Tina Barry in American Poetry Journal (Issue 14, Summer 2017)