Early Riser
Photograph by Alexis Rhone Fancher
Copyright © 2019 by the photographer. All rights reserved.

The botanist takes his work to bed 
Knows well how the flowers on a yucca tree 
top erect stems every spring 
and serve as no-tell hotel rooms 
Where Tegeticula yuccasella moths 
dive into blossoms to mate with the opposite sex 

Except those rooms do tell 
in honey scented notes of pollen 
before the female moth drops eggs into the flower’s ovaries 
Titillating the botanist by her ability 
to sense pheromones from other females 
And to move on to virgin blooms that don’t reek of sex 
before depositing her eggs 
 
The same scent that rides the air through 
the botanist’s open window and stirs production 
of his own sticky substance 
He dreams of spring and its provocations 
But he laughs along with his coworkers in the lab 
when they joke about “going green” 
And prefers not to acknowledge the word arborphilia 

Ellaraine Lockie

is widely published and awarded as a poet and essayist. Recent poems have won the 2019 Poetry Super Highway Contest, the Nebraska Writers Guild’s Women of the Fur Trade Poetry Contest, and New Millennium’s Monthly Musepaper Poetry Contest. Sex and Other Slapsticks (Presa Press, 2019) is her 14th chapbook. Earlier collections have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England, and the Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award.

Her poems have found their way onto broadsides, buses, rented cars, bicycles, cabins, greeting cards, key chains, bookmarks, mugs, coffee-sack labels, church bulletins, radio shows, and cable TV, as well as into hundreds of national and international journals, magazines, and anthologies.

Ellaraine has been awarded multiple residencies and fellowships from both Centrum and Summer Literary Seminars, and thirty of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also teaches writing workshops, frequently judges poetry contests, and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine Lilipoh.

Her pollages, which combine handmade papermaking, poetry, and collage, have appeared in juried art shows around the country and have been the subject of a one-woman gallery art show and several online essays and interviews. They also exist in several private art collections and have appeared in: The Centrifugal Eye, Rio Grande Review, Homestead Review, Sein Und Werden (England), Prairie Connection, Ascent Aspirations, and Alchemy. Ellaraine’s book The Gourmet Paper Maker (how to make paper with the inedible parts of fruits and vegetables) is published in six languages.

[See also Pollage Number 92 here in Issue 1 of MacQ.]

Alexis Rhone Fancher

is the author of five books of poetry and photography: Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018); How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart-stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014); and three books published by KYSO Flash Press: State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (2015) and its companion volume, The Dead Kid Poems (2019), and Enter Here (2017), a full-length collection of photographs and erotic poems.

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, The MacGuffin, Slipstream, Hobart, Cleaver Magazine, Poetry East, Fjords Review, Rust + Moth, Pirene’s Fountain, Askew and KYSO Flash.

Her photographs have been published worldwide, including spreads in Diaphanous, KYSO Flash, The Lummox, Serving House Journal, River Styx, and Rogue Agent, and on the covers of Chiron Review, Heyday Magazine, Nerve Cowboy, Pithead Chapel, The Mas Tequila Review, Witness and two KYSO Flash anthologies (2015, and the 2018 volume, Accidents of Light).

A lifelong Angeleno, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. From the S-curves of Topanga and the sprawling beaches of the Westside, to the stunning views of downtown L.A. from her previous loft studio, her beloved city can be construed as another character in her work. She and her husband now live on the cliffs of San Pedro, a sleepy beach community 20 miles from their former digs in DTLA. They still have an extraordinary view.

www.alexisrhonefancher.com

www.alexisrhonefancher.com/audio/

alexis [at] lapoetrix [dot] com