Funny how easy it is sometimes; we come together and then come together. English is such a surprising language, how to write about your tongue as it explores my labia, tonguing each fleshy fold, tongue-and-groove. My mother would threaten a tongue-lashing if I didn’t straighten up. You don’t want me to straighten up, prefer me bent. Tangled. Enmeshed. Your body flush against mine, your mouth making a meal of my eagerness. We should make a film of it. A noun. Film it. A verb. A light film of Wet® lube slicks your cock. It slides into me. Easy-peasy. We fit together, snug. You’re so tight! Three of your favorite words as you fuck me, each stroke of your cock, a love poem. Cocks crow. Not actual crow. Not actual cocks. Although there are times when you come inside me, it feels like you’re crowing with delight, all that love, fluids intermingling. I watch your face, blue eyes closed in concentration, consumed by our lust; I can’t help but get on that train, ride you for all I’m worth.

—From Triggered: A Pillow Book by Alexis Rhone Fancher, in collaboration with Clare MacQueen and featuring visual art by Kenna Barradell; see review by Jude Dillon in Issue 20 of MacQ.

Alexis Rhone Fancher

is the author of ten books, most recently BRAZEN, a full-length erotic collection (NYQ Books, 2023); DUETS (Harbor Editions, 2022), an illustrated, ekphrastic chapbook collaboration with poet Cynthia Atkins; and Stiletto Killer (in Italian) from Edizioni Ensemble, Italia (May 2022). Other books include EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQ Books, 2021); Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018); and The Dead Kid Poems (2019), a companion volume to State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (2015).

Rhone Fancher’s poem “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” was chosen by Edward Hirsch for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016). Her poems and flash fiction have been published in 200+ literary magazines and journals, including Aeolian Harp, Askew, Cleaver, Diode, Duende, Gargoyle, Glass, Hobart, Nashville Review, Pedestal Magazine, Petrichor, Plume, Poetry East, Rattle, Slipstream, South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), Spillway, SWWIM, The American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, The night heron barks, Tinderbox, Verdad, Verse Daily, Vox Populi, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

You can find photographs by Alexis on the covers of Witness, Pithead Chapel, Pedestal Magazine, Heyday, and elsewhere, as well as a five-page spread in River Styx. Her street photography is published worldwide.

Since 2013, her work has been nominated 29 times for the Pushcart Prize, and multiple times for these annual anthology awards: The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. In 2018, her prose poem “Cruel Choices” won The Pangolin Poetry Prize.

Until this summer, Alexis and her husband were living and collaborating on the bluffs of San Pedro, California, 25 miles from downtown L.A. Their new home is in the desert a hundred miles east, and they still have a spectacular view.

www.alexisrhonefancher.com

www.alexisrhonefancher.com/audio/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Ode to My Husband’s Perfect French, erotic poem in MacQ (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Ode to My Husband’s Heart, erotic poem in MacQ (Issue 11, January 2022)

⚡ Double-Timed at the Nickel Diner, erotic micro-fiction in MacQ (Issue 5, October 2020)

Erotic works by Alexis Rhone Fancher in KYSO Flash:

⚡ Lola the Human Vagina at UC Medical School (Issue 12, Summer 2019)

⚡ Why I Almost Forgave You (Perché ti ho quasi perdonato) (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ I Prefer Pussy (Issue 6, Fall 2016); see also author’s reading of this poem on YouTube (Moon Tide Press, 13 March 2020).

⚡ Morning Wood (Issue 2, Winter 2015)

⚡ Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera, flash fiction (Issue 2, Winter 2015)