“We never talk,” he said. “If my dick got soft, you wouldn’t even know me.” He gathered his clothes off the floor. His defection took me by surprise. “I feel like a stud horse,” he muttered. Like that was a bad thing. That last night we lay spooned in what I thought was the afterglow. For the first time since I’d left for college, I felt my life was together. He looked like Robert Redford, his body farmhand hard, already leathered; he smelled like sunlight on the plains. I called him “Nebraska,” and when I thought of him, I pictured him with a blade of straw between his teeth the exact color of his hair. We’d meet Wednesdays and Saturdays, screw our brains out. Sometimes I’d even cook him dinner.

—From How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen: and other heart-stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014, Kindle edition); republished here by author’s permission

Bio: Alexis Rhone Fancher