Alexis Rhone Fancher: Three Poems

Alexis Rhone Fancher is Poetry Editor of Cultural Weekly. She is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and Other Heart Stab Poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014). She is widely published, most notably in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Slipstream, H_NGM_N, Fjords Review, Good Men Project, Cliterature, Bukowski On Wry, rawboned, Broadzine! Deep Water Lit, Bloom Lit Journal, and elsewhere. Her photographs have been published worldwide, including the covers of Witness and The Mas Tequila Review. Her poems been published in over twenty chapbooks and anthologies, both in the U.S. and abroad.

*****

I Want Louboutin Heels

I want Louboutin
heels with those trademark red soles,
I want them sexy, I want them high.
I want them slingback and peep-toed
so I can flash the purple polish
on my tootsies.

I want to wear them out of the store, just
you try and stop me.

I want to wow them on
Washington, saunter past C&O Trattoria
and Nick’s Liquor Mart, those bottles of Stoli
stacked in the window, calling my name, past the
summer-clad tourists in December, shivering,
barefoot, like LA has no winter.

In those shoes I’m hot,
stop-a-truck hot, prettiest
girl in school hot, and this
time, I know it.
Flaunt it. Hell, I own it. In those shoes I can
pick and choose, not settle for some loser.
Not drink away regrets, pound back Stoli at
Chez Jay’s, flash their scarlet bottoms when I kneel.

I’ll wear them like my own flesh,
like hooves, like sin.
I’ll keep their secrets, won’t spill
where they’ve been.

Better those shoes with their lurid soles
than you with yours.

***

Lust At The Cafe Formosa

Once, at the Cafe Formosa in L.A.,
I saw the most beautiful girl. And the
best part was, you could see she didn’t know it. Yet.
Didn’t know how anxiously her nipples strained
against her shirt, or that her endless legs
and sloe-eyed gaze were worth a million
bucks… to someone.

She was a sway-in-the-wind willow, her skin the
pale of vanilla ice cream, her hair all shiny black
straight like an Asian girl’s, thick as a mop.
She was maybe seventeen, on the brink, so ripe sex
exuded from her pores. She leaned against the juke box
fingering those quarters in her shorts’ pocket so
they jingled like Christmas, the fabric between
her thighs stretched to bursting.

When her food arrived, the girl unwrapped the
chopsticks, lifted Kung Pow chicken to her mouth,
inhaled the spicy morsels. A long, sauce-slicked
noodle played with her lips and I longed to lick it off.
I’d been alone four years by then, so
used to it even the longing had long departed.

Then she showed up, all fresh-spangled, clueless.
If I didn’t walk out then I never would. Elvis was
crooning Don’t Be Cruel, but I knew she would be.
Girls like her can’t help it.

***

White Flag

On Edward Hopper’s painting, “Morning Sun,” 1952

No one paints loneliness like he does. Those half-clad women by the bed, on
the floor, hunched over, staring out the window, in profile or from behind,
always clean lines, such worshipful light. The gas station in the middle of
nowhere, estranged couples on the bright-lit porch after dark. Even the boats
sail alone. And the diners. The hatted strangers, coming on to a redhead, a
moody blonde, all of them losers, all of them desperate for a second chance.
This morning the sunlight pried open my eyes, flooded our bedroom walls. I
sat alone, in profile on our bed in a pink chemise, knees drawn up, arms
crossed over my calves, staring out the window. Desperate for you. No one
paints loneliness like Edward Hopper paints me, missing you, apologies on
my lips. Come back. Stand below my window. Watch me beg for a second
chance. Downturned mouth, teary eyes, parted knees, open thighs, that famous
shaft of Hopper light a white flag, if only you could see.

What are you looking for?