By Jane Barnes

Well off and bi and rather well turned out, Ramona Cross was considered a little wild according to her friend Virginia. Divorcing her husband after a six-month-long marriage, she held a yard sale of whatever he had left behind. Since he had offered to be the one to go, she offered her garage as a place to store his comic book collection and his books about New Age therapy. Ramona moved from Portland, Oregon, to New York City, to Queens. She said she liked it because “You’re not stuck in a lonely car all day long; but you have that amazing subway system.” In which, Ramona didn’t say, you’re stuck in a subway car and lonely with strangers smashing into you from every side. Excuse me, Miss Sorry. Sorry.

Jane Barnes has finished a poetry manuscript covering 25 years in 250 poems called “The Inbetween: Poems 1982-2007.” A short story of Jane’s, “too big to hug,” is carved on a granite pillar at Copley Square in Back Bay, Boston.

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