Craig Dobson has had poetry and short fiction published in magazines in the UK, Europe, USA, Canada and Asia. He’s currently working towards his first collection of each.
Social Media
It’s 1980 or ’81.
You’ve fallen out with the boy next door –
told his secret to another kid who also couldn’t keep it.
Now there’s laughter as big as the boy next door –
who’s shoving on your front door as you struggle
to close it against his revenge, when your mum
turns up and plays the parent card and you lie
through your relief about some minor misunderstanding
and he slopes back home and you hide in your room for a while.
And, so, the whole thing’s settled.
Except, of course, it isn’t
and, for the first time in your life, you feel like a watched man
and the street – your street – isn’t safe and your shoulder’s
now for looking over and your feet are never out of the starting blocks
and beneath your t-shirt your heart’s beating fast enough
for two boys and never faster than when you spy the scrawl
chalked on the pavement in the passageway to the park
where all the kids play – its bold, untidy letters white
against the warm tarmac as they proclaim that you …will die.
When, after several rainless, summer days, you haven’t,
something in them weakens, just as each dry footfall
has scuffed their threat, wearing them and your terror away.
You wake one morning and realise what all this is and how it works.
Walking straight and level-eyed down the street to the passageway,
you find your own piece of chalk and add your own word
to the end of his: laughing.
© Craig Dobson
Sea Trilogy
I
finder
Where the path cuts the sky
then splits itself: the left a tumble-back
to the ruined farm; the right tracking
down the cliff, fringed with wood sage, thrift
and sheeps bit, till the trees tunnel, softening
to mallows and honeysuckle among the bramble hedge
and pear tree that came no one knows from where,
to the mud mixing underfoot with sand, and then over
the footbridge those students mended two summers since –
the one the kids sit on to stickleback.
After that, where it struggles over the beach,
turning past the coal vein at the rock scree and the disused jetty.
There, where the pools begin, below the tide mark, my dog
picked up the scent; followed it round the first headland,
before the water deepens off the ledge that the crab boats
pass on their way to set and check their orange floats around the bay.
Before that, by the last of the rocks, where the sand starts again
and the old mining path picks up for a bit. There.
Where the tide…
Her red and yellow patterned dress, her hair
blond where it had dried in the sun. Closer, the weed
like a hand on her shoulder, and her back turned, as if…
but then the white and blue on her neck, like stained wax,
and I knew, and my dog barking and barking, sniffing round,
so to grab him and hold him back I had to lean over, and could see…
And where her face should be…
II
father
A plane scratches the blue sky white.
(Cont.)
Gull flights scream for the lone woman
scattering bread to their chaotic insistence.
Beyond her, a couple lean against the promenade railings
staring at the sea while their bored kids, a girl and boy,
chase each other round a bench.
The girl would be the same age as my daughter.
Give or take.
There must have been gulls, too, that day.
Watchful, inquisitive, a tip of the wing
to inspect the little happening beneath:
a girl and a man among the rockpools
on a deserted beach.
The ruffled silver inching in,
a light breeze carrying the sounds
he made her make, then not make,
before he took the water’s edge
to the shingle strip where, turning inland,
he trailed his hurry over pebble and sand,
each third or fourth short stride leaving
precious drops of his blood to dry, salt-dry
as his skin was salt-wet beneath her nails.
Left, too, the buckle from her shoe,
its gilt lodged in the rockpool’s jagged lip
that softened slowly, ceding her to the tide.
III
killer
Not her eyes’
whites’ washed stare.
Nor the little nails fraying
on my forearms’ matted black,
their rubric of stain’s thread silk-billowing
in her hair’s spread current.
Not the netted roil of her legs
around my thighs, whose sported bruises
a fortnight wouldn’t hide.
(Cont.)
Nor those silliest of signs: bubbles babying
in size and temper till the tadpole last
struggled from her lips.
But her tongue’s pale tip, forced at the end
like a mollusc part, tentative, into the clear flow
to taste the last of life, to sift the dark incoming
that washed me clear of her mind.
© Craig Dobson