Brecon dobbie
After Hours
We sit around the circular table, slurping noodles into our hungry
mouths and I think through all the things I could say and then,
I don’t say them. Lately, a lot of bad people. Lately, my evenings
full of red brake lights on the North-Western. I reach for the bean-
sprouts. My skin sits loose on my body. A couple Saturdays ago,
we existed uncomfortably. My mouth full of something bitter and
the skyline, laughing cruelly. That’s never happened before. Not
alone but…alone. And we think people know us but do they, really?
I eat hot chips with tomato sauce and chicken schnitzel with mayo.
You send the first message and then don’t reply to my response.
Strangers take each other apart every day. Terribly. Carelessly. And
I keep scribbling words into a notebook and pretend that it’s enough.
You could take me apart, too. It would be easy. Take a melody,
play it in the dark. The tears fall like machinery. And the morepork,
singing out into the night. Like, where does all this me go when we come
to the cliffside? Identity is invisible—we choose to share it. And it’s
true, I could be more benevolent. And you could love me. But not once
do you ask how my day was. And our bowls get emptier.
Brecon Dobbie finds poetry to be her place of solace. She writes to make sense of things, often without meaning to. Some of her work has appeared in Minarets, Starling, Love in the Time of COVID and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.