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 

heart stab poems, (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (2015), and EnterHere (2017). 

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 

Weekly. She lives in Los Angeles. Find out more at: www.alexisrhonefancher.com