Alexis Rhone Fancher

​Late Laura
 
Perpetually late, Laura wandered into the restaurant, her dyed black hair wispy thin, clothes slightly hanging. She was always apologetic. Always an excuse I didn’t quite believe. Back when times was money, I worked on straight commission. When pressed, she confessed her singleton childhood, broken parents, mother bent on crazy, father so enamored of his whacked out wife he’d do anything wifey asked. When she was fifteen, Laura awoke to her father, pulling her waist-length hair taut above her head, her mother poised over her with sewing shears, cutting close to the scalp. I didn’t scream, Laura said. No one was there to hear me. When she turned seventeen, her parents took her to a cafe in NYC, sat her at a table, and left. A wild-haired man, acne-scarred and snaggletoothed, came up and introduced himself as “Master,” led her away. Laura’s parents had sold her for $5,000; “Master” produced a bill of sale. He was a savage, Laura said. It took her months to escape. You understand now why I’m late, she said. But I grew tired of her tardiness, and began giving her a meeting time a good 40 minutes before the actual appointment. It worked. She showed up on time again and again. One day she asked me why I no longer seemed perturbed when she arrived for lunch. I confessed my subterfuge. She burst into tears. Like she’d been duped. Again. I can’t be alone at a restaurant table, she said. Too traumatic. Her shorn hair. Her “kidnapping.” Her entire, frightened life.

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This poem was first published at MacQueen's Quinterly.

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Hey, 19: Daddy’s Pal, Paul and I Cut to the Chase…
 
Paul pushes into me with all the desperation of his forty-five years. Hey 19, he moans, like the song, and I smile, murmur encouragement as he ruts and grunts, his beer belly slapping against my ass. I’ve cured him forever, he says, of loving Ann, that I’m a better fuck than his ex-wife ever was, that she never could give a proper blowjob, and did I think I could I love an older man, and did I think my daddy would mind? Have to confess, the dude’s got moves. He’s doing things to me down there that thrill my nubile heart. That’s when I remember Paul’s a gynecologist. I figure I could do worse, given my run of bad luck with boys my age, and that doomed foray into lesbo-land with my crazy girlfriend, Anjelica. I’m all in, I tell Paul, and Mona Lisa all over the place, wearing only a smile as I languish on the bed at the Palm Springs hotel, and fall in love… with room service. I run up quite a bill, Dom Perignon, Beluga caviar on Ritz crackers, a giant-sized box of Jujubes. And when Paul gets back from the jewelry shop in the arcade with the small blue box that sparkles, the last thing I want is for the evening to end, for him to come to his senses. 

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This poem was first published in Gargoyle Magazine.
 
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Post-Wedding Photos, High Sierras, 2015
 
It’s a forest, he explains. I marvel at the vertical expanse of green. Trees. And the blue? Sky, he says slowly, like he’s speaking to an amnesiac. How could you forget? he asks. But I have. Our idyllic honeymoon, tucked in a cabin on June Lake, making love under a verdant canopy. A blank. The tangerine sun, igniting the Sierras? All too long ago. We’d been lured by high-rises and fine dining, duped by museums and concert halls and Veuve Clicquot, addicted to partying past dawn. City life eats nature. Replaces it with strive and hustle, that lulling excess, everything pavement, the pigment of money. I remember green, I tell him.

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​Trinity
 
I.
He says there’s no such thing as sin. That it doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s a construct, he explains. Sin exists only in your brain. He taps the side of her skull.
 
The woman's Catholic childhood baptizes otherwise. Indoctrination hard to shake. “Give me a child until she is seven and she’s mine forever,” the Jesuits bragged. Jesus took her wheel until puberty. She liked to say she didn’t stand a chance.
 
What about evil? she persists. What about absolution? How could she survive without that warm bath of forgiveness? The man laughs. Don’t believe in either of ‘em,” he says. She wasn’t letting him off the hook so easily. Bite me, she says.
 
That night as penance, he takes her to dinner at a fine restaurant where he orders for both of them. In French. But I detest frog legs! she cries when dinner arrives. Mange-les quand même,* he barks.
 
II. 
Why do I love him? She pouts into the bathroom mirror after he drops her at her door. She washes her face. Puts on a silk nighty for no one. Kneels at the side of her bed, blasphemes. Mother. Daughter. Holy Ghost, Amen.
 
What do I see in her? The man asks himself on the long drive home. He toys with the idea of unzipping his fly, jacking off in the car, as usual. But tonight, somehow it seems wrong. All that chatter about sin, he thinks. 
 
They each determine to end things. But the nights grow lonely. 
 
III.
They go to the party together. Let’s agree to come home with the one who brung you, he says. DTLA, a loft in the Old Banking district. 8th floor. New Year’s Eve. At midnight, instead of attending mass, she finds herself kissing a woman she hardly knows. Someone zaftig and blonde, named Evelyn, who writes her number on the inside of the woman's wrist. A sweet reveal. Come home with me, Evelyn begs. But she’s promised. And he insists. 
 
When they get back to her place it’s 2 am and she’s horny, still tastes Evelyn on her tongue. When the woman turns to him, straddles his hips, the man pushes her away. It’s late, he says. I’m tired. He has a habit of luring her in, then abandoning her. It isn’t the first time. Maybe a threesome? she teases.
 
She calls Evelyn before the number fades on her wrist. 

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*Eat them anyway! 

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This was first published in Throats to the Sky.

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​Dry Hustle
 
“Hey, Missy! This ain’t no charity. You got till tomorrow to pay up or get out!” The landlord’s eviction threats echoed through the courtyard as I walked the no-man’s-land past his bungalow to mine. He stood, bare-chested, outside his door, illumined by the porch lamp, battered Stetson askew on his ratty curls, dusky skin gleaming with threat. I had walked this path before.
 
Ashley, the other relief bartender at the Disco Duck, had told me not to worry, that she was an expert at the manifestation of cold, hard cash. “It’s called the dry hustle, honey,” she’d said in her saccharin drawl. “Dry because you never have to, you know, fuck ’em?”
 
The landlord blocked my path. Between losing my shirt in Vegas and those emergency car repairs, the rent was two month’s behind. I swallowed my nascent feminism and squared my shoulders, breasts straining the buttons of my bartender’s uniform. I pressed against the landlord, squeezed by. He liked to cop a feel, lick me with his eyes. “Tomorrow,” I promised. He grabbed my arm. His knuckles grazed my breasts.
 
Ashley, at the Disco Duck, sent me to the bar at the Bel-Air Hotel, said it’s where the rich men drink. My dress was too short, too low-cut. Ashley had picked it out. “Trust me,” she’d said. “He’ll be watching your tits, not you. Do what I say. Look sad. Play with your hair. Nurse your wine. When a man comes by, offers you a drink, play it coy. Draw him out. Let him do the talking.”
 
That night when I got home from work, someone had been in my apartment. The door was wide open, and my stuff was gone. Not everything. Just enough so I’d lose my peace of mind. When I walked by his bungalow, the landlord was not in his usual spot. 
 
Ashley had been quite specific. “After dinner,” she’d said, “excuse yourself. Go to the ladies’. When you come back, look distracted, like you just got real bad news.” To demonstrate she pulled her straw-blond hair back from her face, gave me a stricken look.
 
The old man sitting next to me at the Bel-Air Hotel bar was smitten, directed his monologue at my breasts, about how he produced movies and documentaries, how he was separated from his wife. He was on his third martini when I spilled my sad story about the landlord and the break-in and the unpaid rent. He said I looked a lot like his second wife.
 
Ashley’s instructions were explicit. “So then you look that rich man in the eye like a broke-winged bird,” she’d said. “Like you’re something he could fix in a heartbeat.”
 
The landlord would be waiting when I got home. The old man smelled like money.
 
Ashley had schooled me how to move in for the kill. “So he’s on his fifth martini,” she’d said, “while you’re still nursing your first chardonnay. He thanks you for being such a good listener. You tell him how sincerely grateful you’d be if you had a little less on your mind.”
 
“How much?” the old man cut to the chase. He held my wrist in one large hand, reached for his wallet with the other. I stroked that wineglass stem between my thumb and middle finger like it was his cock, looked at him through my long, sad lashes, and when he pulled out a wad of cash I thought fast, and eyeballed the exits before I gave him a number in the low four figures, something he could do without blinking.
 
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​This was first published in Drunk Monkeys.

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Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, Slipstream, and elsewhere. Her eleven poetry collections include Erotic: New & Selected, and Brazen (NYQ Books); Duets (Small Harbor Press), an ekphrastic chapbook with Cynthia Atkins, and Triggered, a “pillow book” (MacQueen’s). Coming soon:  CockSure, a full-length erotic book, from Moon Tide Press, SinkHole, from MacQueen’s Press, and a book of portraits of over 100 Southern California Poets at Moon Tide Press A multiple Best of the Net and  Pushcart nominee, Alexis recently won BestMicroFiction 2025. Find her at www.alexisrhonefancher.com