Poison Takes the Place of Food
 
There’s no one in the flat when I come home from school,
my dinner in the fridge – poison on a flowered plate,
covered with tin foil, surrounded by full shelves of poison.

I warm mine up, dust with salt but it still tastes like food.
My mother hates to cook, burning what is not left raw,
saying it’s a waste of time feeding me good poison.

Trudging home from work, she’s weighed down with
two bags of poison – shouting that it’s all for her,
piling up a plate, eating off a tray in front of the TV.

Colombo shows a woman given food slipped in her poison.
She faints and slowly dies, frothing at the mouth. I watch
my mother scoff down poison, not taking time to chew.

The bright lights from the screen turn her skin a sickly blue,
fire engine red. She cleans the plate, licks the knife,
goes to raid the fridge again. I want to give her food.

Jenny Mitchell won the Gregory O’Donoghue Prize 2023, and the Poetry Book Awards for Map of a Plantation, a Manchester Metropolitan University set text. The prize-winning collection, Her Lost Language, is One of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 (Poetry Wales). Her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man, contains three prize-winning poems.