Amy Barone


Getting in Tune

Surviving takes practice.
It took decades to know

you were better off without them.
Though Italians are supposed to love family.

Tunes tingle memory.
Less can be best.

Break rules.
Tear down the walls of exile.

Expel the darkness
like bees do every spring.

Build the cue. Banish the muse.
Write for a few.

Date music, not musicians.
Tune in on you.



Pieces of a Dream

Shards of faces slip beneath me,
over me, through me.

Glimmering visions in black and white or three colors.
Ones I no longer love appear.

My mother, in the apricot dress
she wore to my sister’s wedding, liquefies.

Flashes of computer screens call me to task.
I’m playing a digital game I don’t understand.

I walk down familiar streets
in cities I no longer know.




Amy Barone’s latest poetry collection, We Became Summer, from New York Quarterly Books, was released in 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing.) Her poetry has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Philadelphia Poets, Sensitive Skin, and Standpoint (UK), among other publications. She spent five years as Italian correspondent in Milan for Women's Wear Daily and Advertising Age. She belongs to PEN America Center and the brevitas online poetry community that celebrates the short poem. A native of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Barone lives in New York City.
 
 
previous page     contents     next page