At Casa Diablo: Portland’s World Infamous Vegan Strip Club

I owned a g-string like this,
the back connected by a rhinestone butterfly.

Starved myself at school to save
my dinner money, bought it from Poundland.

Prized, peeping above my gym shorts on the netball court,
bewitching the boy sat behind me in chemistry.

When Kacy ran away from home she admired the satin cerise,
slutty Swarovski glittering my underwear drawer.

This time, she said, I’m not going back. I never saw inside her house
but I know there was a blue room, I know what happened in it.

We hid from her curfew in Gorse Hill Park, her puffa coat
snagged by brambles as she crouched to claw her way into a bush;

that’s when I saw it, the glint of my butterfly on her tailbone,
twinkling in the ray of my torch beam—I walked off, left her there.

Now I’ve lived a decade beyond her death
this is how she comes to me

in the angel pop of something delicate
catching the light.

Carson Wolfe is a Mancunian poet and Grand Prize Winner of The Disquiet Literary Program 2024. Their work has appeared with POETRY, The Rumpus, The Common, and Rattle. In 2023, they won New Writing North’s Debut Poetry Prize, received awards from The Aurora Poetry Prize, The Edward Thomas Fellowship, and were longlisted in The Poetry Society’s National Competition. They are the author of two chapbooks, Boy(ish), and Coin Laundry at Midnight. Their debut full collection Gone Thing is forthcoming with Write Bloody UK in 2027.