Tuesday Poem - we are farmed out by Jennifer Compton

we are farmed out

the eau-de-nil cabbage cooling on the plate

the towering aunt with the voice like a shriek

—the good child gets sent to the worst place

she doesn't give a backward look when her distracted

father drops her and drives off—she has been told to

be good and she has learned very well how to be that

the big boy locking his sister in the wardrobe

she screamed and she screamed and everyone

got smacked and shrilled up and down the hall

like a flock of angry birds with glittering eyes and sharp beaks

and the cabbage—again—and diarrhoea mince and the spuds

with black tadpole eyes and then the horror of shampoo night

wrenched backwards over the bath like a sacrifice

the amber bar of soap wielded like a flame-thrower

I could hardly open my stinging geranium-red eyes

and after all that goodness, no baby sister, she died

it was home to a sad mother and a drinking father

or maybe I had become a noticing kind of child