Tina Barry

In the Way
 
1.
Only someone intimate enough to turn her wrist and peer closely, would notice the sliver of scar tracing the thick blue vein. She considers a tattoo inked at its base, even though she isn’t a tattoo person. She knows that at 80, she’ll be nothing like the person she was at 60, and she’d never be 16, the year she cut herself. Maybe a flower with no petals? 
 
2.
The writer shouldn’t let the stranger in the front row distract her, but there he is, arms crossed over flat belly, satisfied expression (or was it a smirk?). He’s staring, crossing and uncrossing his legs, as she fumbles the last stanza. Yesterday, when she noticed a woman yawning during the Q & A, she could barely think. Now someone unwraps a stick of gum.
 
3.
Her boyfriend was attractive, in an old surfer kind of way: a perpetual tan, smile lines you could swim in, and as women often told her, He makes me feel seen. But he always did something at parties she had to apologize for, like the comment about her friend having ears like pulled taffy. It was true, but did he have to say it? 
 
4. 
I had my doubts about the palm reader, when I walked into her store front and discovered her devouring a meatball sub, Dr. Phil murmuring in the background. She stared at my right palm, then ran her finger along the curve of my heart line. “Life is complicated for people with lines like yours,” she said. No kidding, I thought.
 
5.
Since his therapist told him to stop self-sabotaging, he no longer attempts a fist-bump when a co-worker greets him; his therapist said a simple Hello was enough. And he stopped himself from sending the fourth text of the morning to the woman who called him a stalker. There’s hope for me, he thought, then snuck out of work early.
 
**
 
I Mention the Deer
 
I preferred my friend’s father. Mine sat silent in cigar smoke, suave in a cheap suit. Hers, a suburban cowboy, weather-worn in plaid flannel, loud with love. “Aw, girl,” he’d say when I visited, patting my cheek, “you’re so darn cute.” On warm evenings, he’d walk with my friend, head bent to listen, one hand holding their mutt’s leash, the other hand around hers. Around 6 pm each night, I’d listen for his truck, then part the bedroom curtains to watch its slow descent. The truck made happy music—a jangle of rusted lawn mowers and car parts, watering cans and bits of bicycles. My affection for him changed one night, though, when instead of odds and ends, a huge buck, eyes paralyzed in surprise, antlers shocked with blood filled the truck’s bed. I didn’t want to believe that he had killed the animal. Or walked to the swing set and unhooked the swings. Or, joined by three neighbourhood men who patted him on the back, hung the deer from its hooves like a desecrated god.
 
**
 
This poem first appeared in Maryland Literary Review.

**

Not Really
 
1. The Liar
 
Never content with being himself, George tries to impress a woman by claiming to be an architect named Art Vandelay. Quite a famous one too, having just designed a new wing at the Guggenheim Museum, that didn’t take very long either. When the woman agrees to a date, George must immerse himself in the history of architecture or be outed.
 
2. She Tries
 
His mother stacks books of Van Gogh’s paintings in the living room, hoping the vibrant visuals will help lift his depression, as they always do for her. She’s delighted to find him engrossed in the pages’ starry skies, vases of flowering cherry blossoms. But when she’s not there, he thinks Really? Dude cut off his ear. 
 
3. Neighbourly
 
For months, she hid behind a curtain, certain her new neighbour couldn’t see her as he puttered about his kitchen. When she noticed him in the grocery store, she offered a casual wave. One morning as she waited for him to pour coffee, he walked to the window and stared back, then pressed his palms against the glass.
 
4. Art Girl
 
Hidden in the girl’s binder, is a sketchbook jammed with drawings of the cheerleader she’s in love with—cheeks ablaze, tiny skirt flipping over tight thighs, pom-poms pounding. A jock steals a page from the sketchbook, presents it to the cheerleader. Before, no one noticed the girl: Nirvana T-shirt, lip ring, head down, skulking. Now they do.
 
5. Make Believe
 
It takes her a while to realize that pretending is okay: The woman at Wendy’s fingering her pearls. Her accountant father memorizing Shakespearean monologues for the local theatre troupe. Women her mother’s age, hair pulled into tight buns, racing to barre class. As a nanny, she never corrects strangers when they tell her the baby has her eyes. 
 
**
 
Before Nanny Cams
 
I told Henrietta that because I had no father, I needed to see how men and women lived together, signs of joined lives. And I wasn’t interested in the obvious: shoes left at the door, his and her mugs, the co-mingling of laundry. 
 
When I babysat, I’d slide open medicine cabinets, twist the cap off cologne bottles in faux-wooden cloaks, inhale the limey scent; electric razors moaned when I pressed their switch. 
 
Comparing the contents of men’s and women’s bedside tables, I found women to be diaries of contradictions: beside a rosary, the flesh-colored orb of a diaphragm, primed for business in its pink plastic case. Under a dog-eared copy of the Scarsdale Diet, sat a plump piece of chocolate-iced yellow cake, wrapped in wax paper.
 
Most men’s drawers held only what they needed: boxes of Trojans, proving sex happened beneath the silky quilted bedspread. Reading glasses for the books they never finished, yellowed receipts never filed. 

The straightest dad, always in a dark boxy suit and thick eyeglasses, a single nod of greeting, surprised me. Eating a chocolate chip cookie baked by his wife, at the Formica kitchen table, I perused his Playboy, collecting crumbs in its centerfold. Then in the stack of photos I found shoved in the back of his night-table drawer: his two toddler daughters, messy-haired and giggling. His petite wife engulfed in a wedding gown, and between two dog-eared black and white photos of mutts: himself as a child, front tooth missing, a stiff Communion suit choking his wiry body.
 
**

Finally, the Dog
 
1. 
I know my street and its trees, one heavy at the hips, split in the middle. Behind it, a house painted green and plum like a bruise. 
 
2.
A gang of guys on bikes once circled me, then peddled into woods with no path, and disappeared. Don’t tell me they weren’t ghosts.
 
3.
I met my neighbour, a palm-sized child/woman, reeking of patchouli, weighted in beads. She told me she loved me. I loved her, too. In that moment, anyway.
 
4.
I passed the house where June lives. I once gave her a giant zucchini. That summer, my garden resembled the world’s largest sunflower, its petals hundreds of yellow squash. 
 
5.
I have stories to tell you. Like the Lab that circles my yard three times, as if he’s casting a spell,  but it’s loud in your nursing home, and I hope you can hear me.
 
**

Tina Barry is the author of Beautiful Raft (Big Table Publishing, 2019) and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Her poems and short fiction have appeared numerous journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, Rattle, Verse Daily, trampset, Gone Lawn, A-Minor, the Maryland Literary Review, SoFloPoJo and upcoming in MER, and The Indianapolis Review. I Tell Henrietta, Tina’s third collection of prose poems, will be published in the summer of 2024. Tina is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.