WHEN HER SON IS DEAD 7 YEARS after a photograph by the author, “woman/dance 4” 1. a woman is dancing on the moon, a barefoot adagio of lilting beams. she didn’t know the light was so addictive. her feet are cooking. her arms are empty. she thinks there is someone to feed. 2. a woman is dancing on a cake plate in her kitchen call her angel food. she skirts the frosting’s edge skates straight to the bone-white middle. she has a persistent memory. she has a penchant for truth. she has a life that is slipping away. 3. a woman is skating barefoot on her sorrow her brain awash in the smell of his skin, her arms shackled to the stars, a pirouette of unmet promises regret. if she blames it on herself she can fix it. 4. a woman is taking her dead boy’s eyes to the moon she wants to show him the whole earth before he finally gets some sleep. 5. a woman is sleepwalking on the moon, stardust clinging to her heels. she’s carrying life inside her a luminescent, big-bellied Madonna. she once loved a Russian poem about a pregnant girl, chasing the moon; but now she’s forgotten who wrote it and how the poem ends. she just keeps chasing the moon. and the moon, with her big belly, complicit, out in the darkness, lighting the way.
Alexis Rhone Fancher’s seven collections include The Dead Kid Poems, Junkie Wife, Enter Here, and EROTIC: New & Selected. She’s published in Best American Poetry, Plume, Diode, Rattle, and elsewhere. Her photos are published world-wide. Alexis lives and frolics in San Pedro with husband, Fancher. Find her at www.alexisrhonefancher.com.
“when her son is dead 7 years” was previously published in Blotterature and nominated for Best of the Net.
All rights © Alexis Rhone Fancher
a moon of one's own 