The Summer of ‘89 | Amy Barnes

My face is the fold of the map where Wichita lives, rectangular with no curves, not enough nose for glasses to sit or vision to see mile maps forward, just traced dot-to-dot faulty fault lines, linear lined with fears of being only a Midwestern girl, Montgomery Ward manager girl, a girl no one wants to pin push as a place to visit or visit with or stay with for more than an afternoon in the back of a Trans Am, a girl with flat hair and flat feet in a flat place where nothing happens except wind, windy tornadoes blowing away dreams and towns and Pizza Huts and ideas that happen to people with less flat faces and less flat life lines that lead to a new state of mind, away from the minding of the state they are born in, in places with locked doors and unlocked minds, far from the idea of being forever left behind crumpled on the dashboard with dashed hopes, searching for higher and higher ground, not grounded by being an older mother child, childless and less interesting than people and places with mountainous breasts and mountains and ocean blue eyes and oceans and much more to Polaroid than stuck in a Stuckey’s, dodged in Dodge City on the way to Colorado.

Amy Barnes has words at a variety of publications including: FlashBack Fiction, McSweeney’s, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, 101 Words of Solitude, X-RAY Lit, Stymie Lit, No Contact Mag, Streetcake Magazine, JMWW Journal, The Molotov Cocktail, Lunate Fiction, Reflex Fiction, Lucent Dreaming, TunaFish Journal, Reckon Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Flash Frog, Leon Review, Perhappened, The Lonely Press, Spartan Lit, Blink-Ink, The Mitre, Complete Sentence, Gone Lawn, Cabinet of Heed, and others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction and also listed at Bath Flash Fiction, Reflex Fiction, Retreat West, Blinkpot, Virtual Zine and NFFD. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor and reads for CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD, The MacGuffin, and Narratively.