Surfer Boy

by Alexis Rhone Fancher and Dion O'Reilly

 

He taught me to eat raw fish, to mix wasabi and soy sauce into a thick green slurry, use ivory chopsticks to dip the sushi without severing it from its rice bed. Clumsy at first, soon we were feeding each other morsels of mackerel, a bite of raw shrimp, salmon sashimi, slippery on the tongue. Easy then to slip into his bed, already besotted with things raw and delicious. Those were the days I was free for the taking, men schooling around, and me, the wide open sea.   He began at my feet, told me not to look at him; I stared at the mirror on his closet door, watched his reflection devour me like bait. You have a beautiful cliTORis, he marveled. It’s pronounced CLItoris, I said. There was a wetsuit in the closet. A surfboard rested next to the bed. On the wall, pages torn from Surfer Magazine — mammoth, lapis lazuli waves dwarfed lone surfers as they shot the curl. A metaphor. We drank a bottle of saki, and then another. He showed me the St. Christopher medal around his neck. He was named for that patron saint of wanderers, but he stayed put until November, when the surf turned cold and the money ran out. Christopher sold off his stuff for traveling cash; dishes, linens, the radio. I like to travel light, he said.   A few nights before Chris left for Maui’s Banzai pipeline, we spent my last fifty on tequila and limes, invited a few of his surfer buds for a final aloha. Before the night ended I went down on one of them while Chris watched. All of us, bombed out of our minds. That guy kept calling, telling me how hot I was and how he wanted to “return the favor.”   Just drop me off here, Chris said when I pulled up at the Hawaiian Airlines terminal at LAX. He removed the long, silver chain with the St. Christopher medal from his neck, placed it over my head. Hey, he said, his lips brushing mine. It’s been real.


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"Surfer Boy" was first published in Interlitq (spring 2021). Written with Dion O’Reilly.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Cleaver, Diode, Duende, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry East, Pedestal Magazine and elsewhere. She’s authored five poetry collections, most recently, Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), and EROTIC: New & Selected (New York Quarterly Books, 2021). Another, full-length collection (in Italian) by Edizioni Ensemble, Italia, was published in 2021. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Daily. www.alexisrhonefancher.com