Carson Wolfe

Boy Shorts

He called me a slut,

for wearing red cut

higher than his temper,

refused to leave the apartment

with me, until I wore his boy shorts,

down to the knee.

I raised the stakes of my punishment

by sneaking into a pair of his Calvins

and posed like the statue of David,

or at least David Bowie, in a mirror

enchanted with Moroccan tile.

The empty pouch in front tingled

big dick energy that I swaggered

with to the party, like an Almoravid

geometer, carving the formula

for my own handsome jaw. Filling

my once-too-square shoulders,

I walked like I owned the room,

like I had my pick, like my body

hadn’t been used as a poker chip

in a game I never win. No.

My spellbound bravado permeated

through the air casting a sapphic

scent a surfer girl rode on.

She dug it, she dug me and my hip

bones smirking above the low rise.

I wanted to rub between her thighs

until a genie came

and granted me a wish

to realise the only boy

I ever wanted to wear those shorts

for was the one hiding

inside me.

Hospital Code for Heroin

I’m lugging buckets from lake

to firebath, filling a birth pool

for a woman lowing

with abandon.

No midwife has come to shoot

her up with diamorphine,

before she can learn it is

hospital code for heroin.

She has not melted

onto a sterile bed, silent

and forgetful that a human

is tearing her open.

She will not be sliced

like an envelope

from both corners

for her baby to be heaved

into this world,

with metal forceps clawing

its soft skull into a purple

chicken egg.

Instead of nitrous oxide

she inhales cannabis,

with her naked partner

who sits like a twin

in their amniotic bath.

He did not turn up drunk,

or use her back as a footrest

while she laboured alone

on all fours like a stray dog.

They breathe together

through each contraction

and a baby is born into water,

pink tinted with a sweetness

of copper earth. I tend the fire,

and the father does not disappear

to the pub, and the mother

is coherent, and every star

under this mountain sky is witness

to proof that birth does not need

to be violent.

Bio

Carson Wolfe lives in Manchester, U.K, with their wife and three children. Carson writes their poetry sat on Lego, in a tipi built between sofas, or if they are lucky, in the bike shed. They are an Aurora prize winner with a dozen publications including Fourteen Poems, Stone of Madness Press, and Kissing Dynamite. Their chapbook on queer family making is forthcoming with Sledgehammer Lit in 2022.