Spring 2020, Volume 28

Poetry by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Once, at fifteen, in a field in Camarillo, I picked raspberries,

ravaged the ruby rows,
juice-stained, and besotted

with the tall, fickle boy
who’d transported me there,

pretended to care.

I wanted him
to pick me.

But I was a dandelion;
he blew me off,

his rebuff a field of bitter fruit
that left me stunned for years.

Even now, at a party, when
someone asks what field I’m in?

I am always in that field,
ripe, stained,
waiting.

 

 

 

BIO: Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Tinderbox, Pedestal Magazine, Diode, Duende, and elsewhere. Her sixth collection, EROTIC: New & Selected, publishes in August 2020 from New York Quarterly, and a full-length collection (in Italian) will be published in 2021 by Edizioni Ensemble, Italia. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly.