If we met now, would she recognize me? I’m a lifetime older. Older than she was at her death. My body much more lived in. Decades since she passed. My last glimpse of her? The cancer that decimated her body. Unrecognizable at the end, my beautiful mother. Ravaged. If she saw me now, she could pass me in the supermarket, not a wince of familiar, not know she’d given birth to me. She died before I birthed my son, now dead. Such sad symmetry. Have they met? That assumes heaven exists, and I’m not sure I still believe in God. So ... maybe there is no afterlife. Just memories of her that will die with me when it’s my turn. Until no living person remembers her. The last time I could have seen my mother, in her cancer-ward bed at the City of (No) Hope, I refused to go, sick to death of dying; my fiancé, cold in his grave. Enough death to last a lifetime. That last day, my father scolded me. Shamed me. But I would not, no, I could not go. I could not cope. Listen, guilt is a slippery slope. Even now, I shoulder the burden like a winter coat. You did the best you could, my dead mother croons, brushing the hair from my forehead. Forgive yourself. But we both know that’s impossible.

Alexis Rhone Fancher

is the author of 11 books, most recently Triggered: A Pillow Book (MacQ, 2023), an erotic chapbook collaboration with artist Kenna Barradell and editor Clare MacQueen; 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 chapbook 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: Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. In 2018, her prose poem “Cruel Choices” won The Pangolin Poetry Prize.

Until summer 2023, 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

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