Regret Is A Dress To Be Buried In

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

All the dreams she had for her daughter, my grandmother crocheted into the dress, counted stitches. Filigree (happiness), embroidery (success), tatted lace (two solitudes, melded). The honey blond yarn a perfect match for my mother’s hair, down to the shimmery gold strands woven through it.

Regret is cap sleeves, showing off her arms. Toned. All those years of ballet. The corseted waist, full skirt for dancing, the taffeta petticoat that gave her dress rustle and swish. The night of their 20th anniversary, how my mother twirled, dancing to Johnny Mercer’s band, flaunting the dress, safe, she thought, in my daddy's arms.

So this is bliss? my mother sighed, sipped another vodka martini. Who knew cancer loomed in the lounge, lolled with the bartenders and servers on break, hid in the powder room, waiting to stitch itself into her colon, her stomach, her heart, an irregular mass - throwing off the count, crocheting caskets into everything.

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"Regret Is A Dress To Be Buried In" was first published in Spillway (2020).

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently Triggered (MacQueen’s), Erotic: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and Duets, with Cynthia Atkins (Small Harbor Press). Brazen, an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to Erotic, published in 2023, again from NYQ. A coffee table book of Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband, Fancher. They have an incredible view.