You called it the “Winter of the Oranges,” that February into March when our love was new, and the downtown Farmer’s Market sold thin-skinned navel oranges for cheap. You’d grab our reusable bags and head for 5th Street, sampling each farmer’s juicy segments before bringing home a ten-pound sack. I’d never tasted such consistent sweetness—orange to orange, sack to sack, week to week—like nature had conspired to make every orange equal. Bursting they were—skin too thin to peel with fingers—they needed a sharp knife to slice them smartly into quarters or peel them whole, rind a single, perfect spiral, a three-way between peel, pith and fruit. That winter you squeezed the juice into goblets, overflowing. You poured your love into me. But Spring came. The knife bled. Something stupid I said. You, and the oranges, turned bitter overnight.

—Published previously in Vox Populi (18 January 2018), along with one of Rhone Fancher’s photographs; story appears here with her permission

Alexis Rhone Fancher

is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart-stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014), and two books published by KYSO Flash Press: State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (2015) and Enter Here (May 2017), a full-length collection of photographs and erotic poems. Her fourth poetry collection, Junkie Wife, will be published in 2018 by Moon Tide Press.

Rhone Fancher’s writing has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and appears 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, Askew and KYSO Flash.

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, The Mas Tequila Review, and the KYSO Flash Anthology 2015.

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

www.alexisrhonefancher.com/audio/

alexis [at] lapoetrix [dot] com