Alexis Rhone Fancher
Cruel Choices When my husband’s two grown daughters are in town, the three of them go to the movies, or play pool. Share dinner every night. Stay out late. I haven’t seen my stepdaughters since my son’s funeral in 2007. When people ask, I say nice things about the girls, as if we had a relationship. When people ask if I have children I change the subject. Or I lie, and say no. Or sometimes I put them on the spot and tell them yes, but he died. They look aghast and want to know what happened. Then I have to tell them about the cancer. Sometimes, when the older daughter, his favorite, is in town, and she and my husband are out together night after night, I wonder what it would be like if that was me, and my boy, if life was fair, and, rather than my husband having two children and I, none, we each had one living child. His choice which one to keep. Lately when people ask, I want to lie and say yes, my son is a basketball coach; he married a beautiful Iranian model with kind eyes, and they live in London with their twin girls who visit every summer; the same twins his girlfriend aborted with my blessing when my son was eighteen, deemed too young for fatherhood, and everyone said there would be all the time in the world. ** This was first published in Askew, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. ** Midnight in the Backyard of Lust and Longing The sapphists are at it again. Screw you’s! ricochet off our common walls, invectives landmine my window. You cheating bitch! Like clockwork, this drunken Friday night climax to their ceaseless lovers’ quarrel. I’ll kill you! I hear the big one growl. And then the smashed plates, the screams. By the time the cops arrive it’s a full-out brawl, the two women spilling from their back door, tussling across the no man’s land between their tiny backyard and mine. Worse than animals. This time it’s Holly, the younger one, dragged to the patrol car, yellow hair wilding, small hands cuffed behind her back, kicking at the cops in those Daisy Dukes, an army jacket waifing her silhouette. More clothes than she had on the last time the cops rolled up. Or the time before. It’s almost dawn, and the trees shiver in the fog, raccoons slink through the tall grass. Marie, Holly’s better half, paces the yard in a blue bathrobe and slippers, smoking a cigarette, sobbing as the cops jam her lover into their car. Watch her head! she cries, and flings herself across the yard, lunges for Holly through the glass. Baby! Baby! she sobs, the reason for their discord forgotten. Holly mouths a sloppy kiss. Marie opens her robe, presses herself against the glass. Can you believe it? I would give anything to be loved like that. ** This was first published in Slipstream., ** When I dream serpentine, 18, and lost in Istanbul again… it’s always the dream of the illusive snake ring at the Grand Bazaar. Heavy, rose gold, with emerald eyes. It gripped my finger. Would not let go. It is for a man, the turbaned merchant protested, tried to snatch it back. But I loved how it encircled, insinuated itself up to my knuckle. The way the orbs glinted, the entice of its tongue. It spoke of a jeweled future. The merchant, impatient, wanted a decision, wanted too much. Money was tight. Adornment an invitation to be robbed in the confusion of Istanbul’s perilous streets. It was a cruel century for a woman on her own. The ring, I told myself, was of no consequence, an extravagance, not a metaphor or a child. Yet, my life since that decision: rudderless. The abandoned ring a portend for each play-it-safe in my future, the uncertainty that accompanied every bad choice, each panicked dream. Tonight, I’ll reconnoiter the bazaar, eighteen again, only smarter, self-possessed. The ring’s snake eyes will flash an SOS through the labyrinth of narrow stalls, bolts of silk and brocade commingling with complicated carpets and incense and saffron and huge copper pots. I’ll find it. I’ll buy it and restart my life - erase each timidity, each dull mistake, the maze of shops an elaborate loss, a guilt trip, the scent of sandalwood in the air. ** This was first published in A-Minor Magazine (Hong Kong), and in The Bosphorus Review, and in In Aolian Harp. ** Identity Theft I’m telling you, I don’t know who I am. No one else knows, either. I’ve lost my phone, my money, my keys and ID. And now I can’t find my boy. Maybe it’s a robbery, or just a bad dream. The one where night falls early. The one where dead family shows up, and Cory, the first-grade bully who’d shadow me home, and the creepy neighbor with grabby hands from when I was ten. And there’s Raul, a man I had a crush on in college. And my younger sister, deus ex machina, who swoops to my rescue (again) and gives me a twenty, but it blows away. When I ask her for another she shrugs, mutters something our mom used to say, about not throwing good money after bad. The man-crush from college asks me to lunch at a dingy cafeteria, so I know it must be a dream. Raul’s been missing for decades. Presumed down over the Pacific, I overheard at our reunion. At the counter, I order grilled cheese on whole wheat, my son’s favorite. Hard to fuck up grilled cheese. Raul, in front of me in line, pays, I think, for both of us. But the cashier puts out his hand, says, That’ll be $5.50, please. Then I wake up hungry. And my ID, keys, and my boy are still gone. It’s one of those days, straw yellow light, windless. Second summer they call it, that brief, ephemeral part of October brimming with magic and hot, torpid air. Days listless as my sister recovering from a summer cold, as still as my dead boy. ** This won an honourable mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Contest, 2020. ** Guitar Man (for D.S.) His heart was out of tune. Or maybe just unstrung. Too smart, too tall and socially awkward, his heart, he explained, went to college at sixteen, lunched alone, turned cold. He swore he thawed by moonlight, but only on those midnight walks with his thoughts and dog and never with me. His heart was a wah wah pedal, mine, a muffled sob. Itchy for his fingers on its strings, his heart moaned in the dark, echoed from its bottomless sound hole. His fingers fretted down, capo strangling the neck, choking. When invited to the party, his heart proved unpopular, mumbled, danced alone. I wanted to save him but he stopped me at the door: “Man and his dog time,” he said and shut me out. That I loved him even for a moment still astonishes. His heart played in someone else’s band, angled for star turns, solos. It was a sign. When he left, he slung his heart over his shoulder, slept with it instead of me in his arms. Maybe you’ve seen him? His heart had a rosewood neck. Blue eyes. His heart chopped down women. His girlfriend. His wife, I’m told; his only daughter, tall as a tree. ** This was first published in Reunion: the Dallas Review. ** Fire & Ice Oh Annie! I hang your portrait in every place I call home. Your eyes follow me, pin me down. Like you know something I don’t. I can’t forget how you show up at my door, dirty-blonde hair in two long braids, heavy make-up on your pale face. Revlon’s Fire & Ice, you say when I complement your lips. My mother wore that color, I want to say — but don’t, afraid to kill the mood. You’re dressed in an old-fashioned, white lace gown that covers you neck to ankle. Chaste, until you step into the light and the gown turns miraculously transparent. You’re naked underneath, the outline of your body, those tennis-toned arms, the way your dark nipples poke through the lace. You are usually so shy, half hidden behind your husband, Jonathan, all six foot four of him. When I look for him in the doorway, you smile. It’s just you and me, you say, like you planned it. Jonathan’s in the kitchen with Eric. I pull you into the studio, lower the grey seamless backdrop, ready the lights, touch up your already torrid lips, wipe an errant stroke of liner off your lower lid. I want to kiss you, but instead I hide behind the camera, desperate to finger your left nipple, jutting through the lace, a bullseye. You smell like Evening In Paris. I long to take you to bed, strip the gown from your body, revel in your nakedness. But I keep thinking of your shady husband and my shady husband, how they might come in at any moment and get the wrong idea. How they’re out in the kitchen, guzzling beer, thick as thieves, always plotting their next score. How they’ll make a big haul dealing coke to the Angels, or maybe selling guns or diamonds. Move us all to Costa Rica, and go straight till the money runs out. ** This was first published in Panoply. ** Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently Erotic: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and Duets (Small Harbor Press) an ekphrastic chapbook written with Virginia poet, Cynthia Atkins. Brazen, an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to Erotic, published in 2023, again from NYQ. A coffee table book of Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband, Fancher. They have an incredible view. |
|