He’s a stranger, come
home to the girl in his head, the one she’s forgotten
exists. Riding his
nightmare back to its source, he searches the empty
house, shore, the entire
village of Laugharne, topsy turved with her absence, a trail
of men and empty whiskey flasks the only clue.
Of course, she’d bolt—
a flighty bird—her dancing feet bewitched. Oh, madding
object of back-seat
desire, Gus glaring at us in the rear-view like he
didn’t arrange it.
Your tongue down my throat, my vagabond hands all over
you. It’s a dusty
road from lust to New York City, pot-holed with babies,
betrayal and booze. Some nights, you can hear her drunken
rosary: “Tell me!
Is he dead? Is he dead? Is the bloody man dead?”
—Inspired by “Love in the Asylum” by Dylan Thomas (The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Original Edition, New Directions, 2010). “Madhouse Pas de Deux” was first published in Poets Celebrate Dylan Thomas, an anthology in homage to Dylan Thomas and his wife, Caitlin (Blank Rune Press, Australia, 2014); and is republished here by author’s permission.
is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart-stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014) and State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (KYSO Flash Press, 2015).
Her poems appear in more than 100 literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2016, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Rattle, The MacGuffin, Slipstream, Hobart, Cleaver Magazine, Poetry East, Fjords Review, Rust + Moth, Pirene’s Fountain, and Askew; and her photographs have been published worldwide, including spreads in River Styx, Heart Online, and Rogue Agent, and on the covers of Heyday Magazine, Chiron Review, Witness, and The Mas Tequila Review. Her writing has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
A lifelong Angeleno, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes a monthly photo-essay, “The Poet’s Eye,” about her on-going love affair with Los Angeles. From the S-curves of Topanga and the sprawling beaches of the Westside, to the stunning views of downtown L.A. from her 8th-floor loft studio, her beloved city can be construed as another character in her work.
www.alexisrhonefancher.com
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alexis [at] lapoetrix [dot] com
