Tina Barry
Welcome ladies your name?
Come with me I heard your voice
as if you had let loose the “lady of the house”
A secret life hidden deep in its vault a little black
book a wound A kind of toxic sexuality in a nut
shell She phoned me She saw the moon
that bled into my mouth Bed borrowed
it felt the taste of fire rock scald He
went off a cork-trapped wine Notorious
black vestige of age Of underage Of by
gone To whom one had access has
had access to the women O
Love O Love Come
with me
Author’s Note: Borrowed lines from Sonnet VII of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets, and the article “Those Little Black Books, From the 1700s to Epstein,” by Vanessa Friedman and Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times, July 25, 2019, Page D1.
Tina Barry is the author of Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016) and Beautiful Raft (Big Table Publishing, 2019), prose poems about Virginia Haggard and Jean McNeil, the artist Marc Chagall’s lover and her daughter. Barry’s work has appeared in Drunken Boat; Inch Magazine; Yes, Poetry; Connotation Press; and The American Poetry Journal, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016), edited by Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017), edited by Feckless Cunt: A Feminist Anthology (world split open press, 2018), edited by A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Books, 2019), edited by Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women (Sable Books, 2017), edited by Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women (Kasva Press LLC, 2016), edited by Barry lives in Ulster County, NY, where she teaches poetry and short fiction.
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