Rebecca McCutcheon

dogs howl in the bar

The bar is a triangle in the corner and the drinks
are sticking. Bruce leans over the game table, plays

a poor hand. Beer has left his eyes four beats behind.
You pass, and he asks me what happened, why

we don’t talk anymore. I say you’re too one-sided.
All you left me with was footprints and a headache.

Bruce can’t drop it, mimicking you and finding
himself funny. You loom behind him like a full

moon, a deliberate scream for dogs. Your face stays
the same, eyes earthing your anger. Braver animals

would be calling for help by now. Bruce can see
I’m in trouble, but people can know a lot of things

without doing anything to change them. You tell
anyone you can how sorry you’re going to make me

how dogs mark the things they see as theirs to come
back to them later. Bruce is sort of remorseful, drawls

through a few more pints of Stella, drapes himself
over me with a sigh. We lose hours to fear. I go

back to my room. A wet semi-circle hugs the door
just as you promised. We get each other so wrong.

Rebecca McCutcheon is a poet living on the Essex coast. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Propel and berlin lit. Her debut collection, Down, is published by Out-Spoken Press.

Rebecca wrote the following about her poem:

When I think of scenes or events, they’re distilled into their details. The more precise these are, the more they start to feel like metaphors. I like finding the space where the literal and metaphor become hard to distinguish. The question becomes what is an image, and what really happened?