LUST AT THE CAFE FORMOSA
by Alexis
Rhone Fancher
Once, at the Cafe Formosa in
L.A.,
I saw the most beautiful girl. And
the best part was, you could see
she didn’t know it. Yet.
Didn’t know how anxiously her nipples
strained
against her shirt, or that her endless
legs
and sloe-eyed gaze were worth a
million
bucks... to someone.
She was a sway-in-the-wind
willow, her skin
the pale of vanilla ice cream, her
hair all shiny black
straight like an Asian girl’s, thick
as a mop.
She was maybe seventeen, on the
brink, so ripe
sex exuded from her pores. She
leaned against the juke box
fingering those quarters in her
shorts’ pocket
so they jingled like Christmas,
the fabric
between her thighs stretched to
bursting.
When her food arrived, the girl
unwrapped
the chopsticks, lifted Kung Pow
chicken to her mouth,
inhaled the spicy morsels. A long,
sauce-slicked
noodle played with her lips and I
longed to lick it off.
I’d been alone four years by then,
so used to it even the longing had
long departed.
Then she showed up, all
fresh-spangled, clueless.
If I didn’t walk out then I never
would. Elvis was crooning
Don’t Be Cruel, but I
knew she would be.
Girls like her can’t help it.
* * * * *
©Alexis Rhone
Fancher First published in poeticdiversity,
2014
Alexis Rhone Fancher is the author of How I Lost My Virginity to Michael
Cohen and other
She is published in The Best American Poetry 2016, Rattle,
Slipstream, Hobart,
Cleaver, The
MacGuffin,
Poetry East, Plume, Glass, and elsewhere. Her photographs
are published
worldwide, including the
cover of Witness, Heyday, and Nerve Cowboy, and a spread in River
Styx. A multiple Pushcart Prize and
Best of The Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural
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