Don’t Try

by Alexis Rhone Fancher


Since my son died of cancer in 2007
I find funerals hard to attend.
Unless it’s family, I make an excuse,
although there is none, really.
I especially regret not attending Paul’s funeral in 2016,
and Molly’s last year after her long decline,
but the post-burial depression holds me captive.
After an insomniac night or two,
the kind part of me gives the selfish one a pass.
When I see Molly’s widower,
I pretend he doesn’t know I wasn’t there.
There were close to 300 mourners.
If he asks, one day, apropos of nothing,
I’ll most likely tell him I couldn’t get out of bed.
Yesterday, I drove all over Green Hills Memorial Park,
where Bukowski is buried.
Don’t Try is written on his gravestone, above a silhouette
of a pugilist, bookended by birth and death dates.
We inhabit the same zip code.
Days before Paul died, he called me, manic, rambled for an hour.
Big plans, he said. I’m moving back to Paris in the fall.
When he showed up at my party, weeks before,
people thought he was homeless, walked in off the street.
Paul played us Russian love songs on his guitar.
Here are the photos. He looks bloated. Lost.
Two weeks later he was dead.
I’ve considered Paul’s solution,
but the end is coming swiftly enough.
Tonight the dude across the street is blasting bad ‘80s rock.
It’s mid-July, and the sun stays long in the sky.

For Gerald Locklin


* * * * *

"Don't Try" was first published in Chiron Review.

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.