I took my heartache to Venice Beach, laid it out beside me on the sand, loaned it my spare beach towel and your green visor hat. Exhausted, I slept, but my heartache would not; it kept vigil in the August heat, one finger on my grief like an EMT. If you were here, we’d go for a swim, cruise the Boardwalk, lunch at the Sidewalk Cafe. But my heartache wouldn’t hear of it. It wanted me to stay put. I craved an epiphany, God to reach down from the halcyon blue, and set me upright with you firmly planted beside me. So this time cancer could not knock you down. That day at the beach when you were little, I gave you a twenty for ice cream and you returned with no change? How we marched into the store together and shamed the thief behind the counter, till he begged, “Just please don’t call the cops!” You, my sweetness, licked the Rocky Road. “Stealing from a child?” I yelled across the freezer. “You’re a real class act.” I snatched back the twenty, like I wish I could snatch back your life.

—Previously appears in State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (KYSO Flash Press, forthcoming in October 2015); republished here by author’s permission

Alexis Rhone Fancher

is the author of How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen and Other Heart Stab Poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014), and State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (KYSO Flash Press, forthcoming in 2015).

Her work appears in Menacing Hedge, Ragazine, Rattle, The MacGuffin, Slipstream, Fjords Review, H_NGM_N, great weather for MEDIA, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. Her poems are published in over 25 American and international anthologies. Her photos are published worldwide. Since 2013, Alexis has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and four Best of the Net awards.

She’s photography editor of Fine Linen Literary Journal, and poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she publishes The Poet’s Eye, a monthly photo essay about her ongoing love affair with Los Angeles.

www.alexisrhonefancher.com

www.alexisrhonefancher.com/audioclips

alexis [at] lapoetrix [dot] com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Six Fancher Poems, which Steve Kowit, former Poetry Editor of Serving House Journal, had chosen for the spring 2015 issue before he passed away in April; all six poems plus poet’s commentaries appear in the SHJ memorial issue.

⚡ The Poet Reads Three Poems, text and audio in Menacing Hedge (Winter 2015); includes the prose poem “Tonight I Dream of My Last Meal with My First Ex-Husband Who Was Both Fickle and Bent”

⚡ Author Alexis Rhone Fancher Eats Bukowski for Breakfast, a review of her book, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen, and other heart stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014), in Examiner.com (25 August 2014); includes “I Want Louboutin Heels,” “The Happiest Men in L.A.,” and two other poems