Carson Wolfe
Carson Wolfe is a Mancunian poet and winner of New Writing North’s Debut Poetry Prize (2023). Their work has appeared with Rattle, The Rumpus, The North, New Welsh Review, Evergreen Review, and The Common. They were longlisted in The National Poetry Competition (2023) and have received awards from The Aurora Poetry Prize, The Edward Thomas Fellowship and Button Poetry. You can find them at www.carsonwolfe.co.uk.
FIRST
We lived on the same street with single mothers
struggling to do it all, four-eyed and useless
at sticking up for ourselves. Our glasses clinked
in the dark, a toast to my future. Too much
tongue, he left a mess on my chin. I wiped it
on my sleeve and dumped my jumper in the wash.
Denied my first kiss was with a boy whose mother
never cleaned, their hallway paved with junk mail,
the swampy toilet sending me six houses home
when I needed to pee, my sink lined with rose
soap and shells. Us kids all seemed to grow up
but he stayed in his room taking ecstasy, playing
Fifa in his sweaty bed sheets. Put a donk on it,
he’d say whenever I ran into him in the daylight,
skin pale as a sheet of rizla. I never kissed that boy
I’d tell myself. And not once did he bring it up.
Didn’t flinch when I told everyone my first kiss
was with his best friend by the railway tracks.
I saw him last outside a house party—unshaved
ghost in a grey tracksuit. I didn’t ask how he was
or what he’d been up to, but got up on my tiptoes
so he didn’t need to crouch, hugged him goodbye,
and as I opened my car door—a sucker punch,
his nose brucked up by some coke head, the cream
interior of my BMW sprayed with his blood.
I chased him a little, called his name, but he ran
right home to his mum. Years later, she found
a lump and died, and the council kicked him out,
replaced the cracked window, binned the mattress
slumped in the yard, moved in a new mother
and her young son. I never got the blood out,
but this woman, she put up white blinds
and lines the bathroom windowsill with candles.
I imagine the fizz of bath salts dissolving, testing
the heat before immersing her baby boy in bubbles.
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