The poet as a young woman. Photographer unknown.
Family photo © by Alexis Rhone Fancher.

 

The Girl in the Photo Took No Photos

of her lover. Before she met him, she had documented every mundane moment like it mattered. After, was she too busy living? Too greedy to take a time-out? Did she sense that her true love had little time left? That she had to cram in as much as she could before it ended?

The girl in the photo searched her apartment, looked everywhere. There were no photos of either of them, let alone one of them together. The girl and her lover were too busy making memories to document them. And now it was too late.

The girl who took photos of everything had nothing to show for it. No proof their love ever existed. How could she have been so careless? But of course, she thought she had all the time in the world.

 

The poet as a young woman. Photographer unknown.
Family photo © by Alexis Rhone Fancher.

 

—From The Girl in the Photo, Rhone Fancher’s chapbook of ekphrastic prose poems (under submission)

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡The Girl in the Photo, five poems by Alexis Rhone Fancher in Vox Populi (4 February 2026)

⚡Before & After, the initial poem and photograph which inspired this series, in The Ekphrastic Review (8 November 2025)

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s

photo-portrait book of 100+ Southern California poets is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2026. She is the author of 12 published books, most recently Sinkhole: The Sister Pantoums (MacQ Books, 2026); Triggered: A Pillow Book (MacQ, 2023), an erotic chapbook collaboration with artist Kenna Barradell and editor Clare MacQueen; and BRAZEN, a full-length erotic collection (NYQ Books, 2023).

Other books by Rhone Fancher include DUETS (Harbor Editions, 2022), an illustrated, ekphrastic chapbook collaboration with poet Cynthia Atkins; Stiletto Killer (in Italian) from Edizioni Ensemble, Italia (May 2022); EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQ Books, 2021); Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018); and three books from KYSO Flash Press: a full-length collection of poems, Enter Here (2017), 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; The American Journal of Poetry; Askew; Cleaver; Diode; Duende; Gargoyle; Glass; Hobart; The MacGuffin; Nashville Review; The Night Heron Barks; Pedestal Magazine; Petrichor; Plume; Poetry East; Rattle; Slipstream; South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo); Spillway; SWWIM; Tinderbox; Verdad; Verse Daily; Vox Populi; Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles (Beyond Baroque Books, 2015); and elsewhere.

You can find Rhone Fancher’s photographs 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 writing has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize, and multiple times for these annual anthology awards: Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. Her work was selected by final judge Dawn Raffel for Best Microfiction 2025.

Until summer 2023, Alexis and her husband were living and collaborating on the bluffs of San Pedro, California, 25 miles from downtown L.A. They’re now settled in the Mojave Desert a hundred miles east, and they still have a spectacular view.

www.alexisrhonefancher.com

www.alexisrhonefancher.com/audio/