
Alibi
by Carson Wolfe
Police say I should have pressed charges
at the time. At the time, calling the cops
made me a rat bitch. The one time I did,
an officer stepped through the threshold
of where my door had stood on its hinges
hours earlier. He slouched in my armchair,
sipped tea brewed from my manners.
I clutched at what I assumed a fractured rib,
and he sighed, or huffed, or maybe just
exhaled a bit too loud. This neighbourhood,
the same every night. When you say he “broke in.”
Lady. He closed his notepad. Calm down now.
Didn’t he have a key?
Carson Wolfe (they/them) is a Mancunian poet and winner of New Writing North’s Debut Poetry Prize (2023). Their pamphlet Boy(ish)Vest (2022) was praised by Dr Kim Moore as an ‘unforgettable, wild, risk-taking roller-coaster of a book’. Their work has appeared in Rattle, Fourteen Poems, Button Poetry, and The Penn Review.