Photography © Alexis Rhone Fancher

 

Less Than a Second

Come winter, bored
with nothing to do
at night
I searched the sky
from the attic window
the News reporting
endlessly on UFO’s.
I saw planes moving
in the vast blackness
east to west or
some direction
at some normal
speed for a plane.

When out of nowhere
one night I spotted
a few blazingly bright dots
take a leap across the sky
in less than a second:
One on the one side
and one on the other.
As though they made
a plan to switch.

I told you and you
laughed it off.
From the attic window
all winter
I watched this go on.
Finally tired of looking
I thought:
Martians if you see me
you can have me.

 

Susan Isla Tepper has two new books forthcoming from Wilderness House Press. Her novel Hair of a Fallen Angel came out from Spuyten Duyvil Books, NYC, in the fall of last year. A twenty-year writer, she is the author of twelve published books of fiction and poetry and 7 stage plays. Tepper has been nominated 24 times for the Pushcart Prize in both fiction and poetry. Her play The Crooked Heart is a broken love story concerning artist Jackson Pollock that premiered on October 25, 2022 at the Irish Repertory Theatre in NYC. Adapted from an earlier novel, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A YouTube music video for her latest novel was produced by Tim Young and Paula Parente.

Poet/photographer, Alexis Rhone Fancher has authored 11 books of poetry and flash, most recently, Erotic, and Brazen (both published by NYQ.), and Triggered (MacQueens). Coming up: A Picture is Worth a Poet’s Words, a photo-portrait book of over 100 Southern California poets will be published in early 2026 by Moon Tide Press, in addition to publishing Alexis’ full-length, erotic book of poems and flash fiction, CockSure. SinkHole, a chapbook of twenty-five“sister” pantoums, exploring her beloved sister’s final illness and death, will be published by MacQueen’s in January, 2026. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, Alexis recently won Best MicroFiction 2025. She calls the Mojave Desert home.