in a room filled with friends, his fiancée, our family, I watch the hospice nurse give him another shot of morphine to ease the pain that even at the end will not let him be. I look into the faces of his panicked friends—none of us knowing where to put the grief, the incredulity. How could a boy filled with so much life be on the cusp of death? Axed into wherever it is lost boys go. As my son lies dying on a hospital bed in the living room, I do not know where to put my hands; his fiancée fluttering above him like a butterfly, his friends’ claustrophobic encircling. There is no way to prepare for the death of a child. The out of order-ness fucks with head, heart, and bones, each somehow more brittle than before. Impossible to look my dying boy in the face, so I get into my car and drive away as fast as I can, hurtling down the 91 Freeway, putting distance between us. I remember his early birth 26 years ago, that new baby smell, his eyes bright and focused on mine, like I could show him the way.

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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