1.

Bon anniversaire, my birthday present smiles. Her body is warm and willing. I kiss her lips, her neck, her breasts, travel down her belly. She opens to me like a flower, all soft-focus, the scent of lilacs on her skin. She pulls me to her mouth, wants to kiss and kiss. I let her tongue have its way with me. After all, it is my birthday. Later we spoon, her hair freshly washed, fragrant, my hot breath searing the back of her neck, my fingers still fondling her clit.

My birthday present stretches, catlike, unsheathes her manicured claws. I ask her to scratch my back, those hard to reach places, and she does, careful not to break the skin. She whispers, in French, three phrases she’s memorized: Bon anniversaire. Je t’aime, cherie. Veux-tu coucher avec moi?* That pretty much covers everything.

2.

I found it in the street! That was me, duplicitous even at eight. My mother’s treasured jade and diamond ring, a gift from her long dead father, suddenly turned up on my finger. It had been missing for weeks. I swear, I found it in the street! I lied again. The look on her face! Oh my God, my mother sobbed. I’ve birthed a liar and a thief! She was inconsolable.

Show me exactly where you found it! My mother grabbed my hand, pulled me toward the street. Show me! she said again. I pointed to the end of our driveway. There! I said. It was as good a place as any. The sorry girl wanted to come clean. But the bad girl couldn’t let my mother win. Didn’t she know I got my stubbornness from her?

3.

When my possessions start to disappear, I’m suspicious but have no proof. Among the missing, my long dead mother’s jade and diamond ring, left to me in her will. My birthday present swears she’s innocent. Je ne suis pas une voleuse!** One more phrase she’s learned for just such an occasion. What goes around comes around.

I confess, my birthday present resembles my mother. Blonde, blue-eyed, calculating. My birthday present even wears Femme, my mother’s favorite perfume. They could almost be twins. So does this mean I’m fucking my mother? It must be karma.

Author’s Notes:

* Happy Birthday. I love you, dear. Wanna fuck?

** I am not a thief!

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 30 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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