Claire Askew

You will not need kindling.
I think I’ll go up quick
as summer timber, my anger
big and dry as a plantation
that dreams of being paper:
the updraft already made
in the canopy, and heading down.

Bring your axe to split me
into parts that you can stack
over the dry leaves, over the coals:
my old coat and my bedding box,
the things given to me by women.
You’ve heard of spontaneous human
combustion. They say it’s fat:
once lit, it flares so white-hot fast
the bones give in.
Make your touch-paper long.

Spread the word that the crowd
who will gather should stand
well back. I am coated
in the accelerant of men:
my craving for their good necks,
their bodies in button-downs
crisp as a new book.

As you douse the embers
I will smell like ground elder
choking the cemetery —
roots looping up
out of dead women’s mouths,
a problem thing
you’ll never get cleared.

Make the stake thick, the bonds
stiff on my innocent wrists.
Burn me the same way
you burned her: do it
because we took the plain
thoughts from our own heads
into the square, and spoke.

From How to burn a woman (pub. Bloodaxe, 2021)

After the horrendous anti-women hatred from Donald and his cult and anyone who voted for him, this poem is raw and fits perfectly in this evening of motors revving dying away and leafs smacking the window.