Your husband has fallen in love.
He says she’s a lot like you. A painter
he met in a bar. They danced all night.
Just like the two of you, at that dive bar
in Santa Fe (when you called at 3 a.m. to say
you’d finally met someone).
When he came to visit, your husband
stayed here. His new love lives close by.
He returned from her arms, all sparkly, school-
boy giddy. Not like last year,
when he was walking wounded, watching
his cell-phone video of your forest burial,
over and over (the one I still can’t get
out of my head).
Your husband has fallen in love. But
she’s married and her spouse is abusive, although
he’s “never touched her.” She’s ready
to leave him, your husband says.
I tell him about our friend, Lynnie,
whose husband “never touched her” either,
until she tried to leave and he shot her
twice in the head.
And there’s your voice in my ear, Kate.
Watch out for my husband, you whisper.
He’s always been naïve.
—for Kate O’Donnell
—Poem was first published in The Nashville Review (5 April 2017), was reprinted in Rhone Fancher’s collection of photographs and erotic poems, Enter Here (KYSO Flash Press, 2017), and appears here with her permission.
[See also
For
Kate, a photograph and haibun, in KYSO Flash.]
San Pedro Sunrise, 14 February 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Alexis Rhone Fancher. All rights reserved.
Reproduced here with her permission.
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She’s a singed torch song, a broken chord, the slip-shadow between superstar and the door. She’s that long stretch of longing riding shotgun from nowhere to L.A., a bottle of Jack Daniels snug between her thighs, always some fresh loser at the wheel. She’s the Zippo in your darkness, a glimmer of goddess in your god-forsaken life, her voice a rasp, a whiskey-tinged caress. She gets you, and you know the words to all her songs, follow her from dive bar to third-rate club clapping too loudly, making sure she makes it home. She’s as luckless in love as you are, star-crossed, the pair of you (in your dreams). If only we could choose who we love! Tonight the bartender pours your obsession one on the house, dims the lights in the half-empty room as she walks on stage, defenseless, but for that 0018 rosewood Martin she cradles in her lap like a child. If you ask nicely, she’ll end with the song you request night after night, about the perils of unrequited love. You’ll blurt out your worship into her deaf ear, while her fingers strum your forearm and her nails break your skin. Give the lady whatever she wants, you’ll tell the barkeep. Like that’s even possible.
—Prose poem was published previously in San Pedro River Review (Volume 10, Number 1, The Music Issue, Spring 2018) and appears here with author’s permission.
Fire Sky Sunrise
(San Pedro, 14 October 2017)
Copyright © 2017 by Alexis Rhone Fancher. All rights reserved.
Reproduced here with her permission.
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Nobody held him down, twisted
his arm, shoved in a needle.
Back then, we fit together like
cooking spoons in a drawer.
Bent spoons. A cadaver drawer.
—Poem is from Rhone Fancher’s chapbook Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, March 2018) and appears here with her permission.
San Pedro Sunrise, 24 March 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Alexis Rhone Fancher. All rights reserved.
Reproduced here with her permission.
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I grew roses the size of
insurmountable odds.
My sister’s were bigger,
smelled sweeter.
I had a child.
She had two.
Mine died.
—Poem was published previously on a postcard by Red Flag Poetry (15 March 2018) and appears here with author’s permission.
Full Moon Over San Pedro, 7 August 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Alexis Rhone Fancher. All rights reserved.
Reproduced here with her permission.
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is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart-stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014), and two collections from KYSO Flash Press: a chapbook, State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (2015), and the full-length, L.A.-centric collection of photography and erotic poems, Enter Here (2017).
In March 2018, Moon Tide Press released her latest, the chapbook Junkie Wife, an intimate illustration of “the dysfunctional marriage of vice and virtue as a means to attain the spiritual” (Clint Margrave).
Rhone Fancher’s writing has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and appears in more than 100 literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2016, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Rattle, Slipstream, Plume, Nashville Review, Diode, Glass, Tinderbox, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
Her photographs have been published worldwide, including spreads in River Styx, Heart Online, and Rogue Agent, and on the covers of Witness, Heyday Magazine, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, and The Mas Tequila Review, among others.
A life-long resident of Los Angeles, Rhone Fancher is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes a monthly photo-essay, “The Poet’s Eye,” about her on-going love affair with the city.
www.alexisrhonefancher.com