Midnight in the Backyard of Lust and Longing

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

The sapphists are at it again. Screw yous! ricochet off our common walls, invectives landmine my window. You cheating bitch! Like clockwork, this drunken Friday night climax to their ceaseless lovers' quarrel. I'll kill you! I hear the big one growl. And then the smashed plates, the screams. By the time the cops arrive it's a full-out brawl, the two women spilling from their back door, tussling across the no-man's land between their tiny backyard and mine. Worse than animals. This time it's Holly, the younger one, dragged to the patrol car, yellow hair wilding, small hands cuffed behind her back, kicking at the cops in those Daisy Dukes, an army jacket waifing her silhouette. More clothes than she had on the last time the cops rolled up. Or the time before. It's almost dawn, and the trees shiver in the fog, raccoons slink through the tall grass. Marie, Holly's better half, paces the yard in a blue bathrobe and slippers, smoking a cigarette, sobbing as the cops jam her lover into their car. Watch her head! she cries, and throws herself across the yard, lunges for Holly through the glass. Baby! Baby! she sobs, the reason for their discord forgotten. Holly mouths a sloppy kiss. Marie opens her robe, presses herself against the glass. Can you believe it? I would give anything to be loved like that.

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Copyright © 2019 Alexis Rhone Fancher All rights reserved; first published in Slipstream; reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission.

L.A poet Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Poetry East, 

Hobart, Verse Daily, American Journal of Poetry, Duende, Plume, Diode, Wide Awake: 

Poets of Los Angeles, and elsewhere. She’s the author of five published poetry collections, most 

recently, Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash 

Press, 2019). EROTIC: New & Selected, publishes in 2020 from New York Quarterly. Her 

photographs are published worldwide, including River Styx, and the covers of Pithead Chapel,

Heyday, and Witness. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry 

editor of Cultural Weekly. www.alexisrhonefancher.com