Verdad Magazine Volume 28
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.