2 Poems from Anthologies from Amy Barnes

Making Change with Cohen

Notes fell into my fedora in
Too poetic of a way
Too synonymous with a busker I
once knew
Once was
And his
panhandled songs
Stolen from places
And books and letters and the corners of my mind where music stood at corners
begging
As if there is such a thing as too poetic or too musical or too big of a fedora -
stuffed with first notes and last notes and echo notes and silent notes and end-notes
Left behind by no crowd and all crowds and crowded crowds and invisible crowds
Maybe there is and
maybe there is not but the double f alliteration that rhymes with clef and marches -
next together
in fell and fedora
Almost made me laugh
But I didn't
Instead
I inhaled
One more time my notes that smelled of music and sadness and grief and crescendos and
whole notes and half notes and
scribbled idea notes on napkins and marble slabs and cocktail umbrellas and gray -
matter
Not of a million fingerprints on faded dollars left in hats and boxes and must violin -
cases
I hummed a dirge
of faded songs
That made no one laugh
And
left my fedora empty

The Arborist

My tongue is a root where trees grow at night. I practice play speaking
with a mouth full of trees each day with rapid rhymes and twisters.
The rain in Spain falls mostly on the plains as she sells seashells by the sea shore,
all through leaves and acorns that drop plop into my gut. I cut the maples and oaks -
and aspens down each morning, making paper for haikus and haibuns and stressed-
syllable sonnets.
Before I can swallow the sunrise surprise saplings, a new tree grows to replace it,
branching into my gums and teeth, caught in each birch breath.  I swirl oil colors
to make Japanese paper and anime character letters to speak for me.
I last wrote a love note on mouth paper a century ago. Ocean ink was free from octopus lovers.
I sent them black hearts that bled into the sea, floated away in tiny corked labelless -bottles that flung themselves at the sugar sand shore, to be found by small children I never birthed or loved or taught to climb mouth trees.

Bio from 2020:
Amy Barnes has words at a variety of sites including The New Southern Fugitives, Flashback Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, X-Ray Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Museum of Americana, Penny Fiction, Stymie Lit, No Contact Mag, JMMW, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Lunate Fiction, Rejection Lit, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit, National Flash Flood Day and others. Her work has been long-listed at Reflex Press (3rd place), Bath Flash Fiction, Retreat West and TSS Publishing. She volunteers at Fracture Lit, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD, The MacGuffin, and Narratively. She is nominated for Best Microfictions (Spartan Lit) and Pushcarts (101 Words of Solitude and Perhappened). Her flash collection, "Mother Figures" is forthcoming in May 2021 by ELJ Editions, Ltd. And soon to be an associate editor at Fractured Lit