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.