Still Life w/Kate, by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Portrait of the Author, by Kate O’Donell (USA) contemporary

Still Life w/Kate
 
I can’t see your soul, Kate says. She pushes the bangs from my forehead, studies my face. I cringe, prefer the fringe, the thick obscurity. Good, I think. I’m afraid to be seen. Take off your clothes, pose for me, she says. When she cajoles, I can’t resist. Kate puts a new canvas on her easel, takes the oils out of their box. When I’m naked, she places me on the bed. The white sheets peak and rumple; she stacks the pillows behind my back. I love your tits, she says as she begins to paint. Hers, she thinks, are too small. Mere nubs. Mine, she says, are generous, the kind of breasts she longed for. Me, too, I say, recalling all the anxious, prepubescent years I’d waited for them to appear. Kate paints the me she thinks she knows. But all she knows are the lies I’ve fed her, certain she’d flee the truth. What a slut I was in my twenties; how I disappoint everyone I love. We know our boyfriends fantasize Kate and I are lovers, and yeah, a couple times it crossed my mind, but it isn’t like that. We each want what the other possesses. Call it worship. In my secret heart, I want to be Kate in all her spectacular, blue-collar, lapsed Catholic perfection. And she? When I ask her what she sees in me, she grabs my face in her hands. Mendacity, she says.

Alexis Rhone Fancher

This was first published in Throats to the Sky.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American  Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, Slipstream, and elsewhere. Her eleven poetry collections include Erotic: New & Selected, and Brazen (NYQ Books); Duets (Small Harbor Press), an ekphrastic chapbook with Cynthia Atkins, and Triggered, a “pillow book” (MacQueen’s). Coming soon:  CockSure, a full-length erotic book, from Moon Tide Press, SinkHole, from MacQueen’s Press, and a book of portraits of over 100 Southern California Poets at Moon Tide Press A multiple Best of the Net and  Pushcart nominee, Alexis recently won BestMicroFiction 2025. Find her at www.alexisrhonefancher.com