Claire Askew

How to burn a woman


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.


*


A spell for the departed


I never visited you,
so I never saw the hospital bed
wedged in the back sitting-room,
its long white bars locked
to stop you dropping off over the side
and sliding on your belly through the house –
its rooms abandoned now,
whitewashed thinly in moonlight –
towards the matchbox, the gas tank, the ladder
or some other disaster;
never saw the litre bottles filled with pills
as big as jelly beans, brown glass
throwing sunlight like the surface
of a dirty pond, safety lids the size
of saucers twisted off in clouds
of powder residue: pill bottles
on the sideboard with the urine flasks
and pads and gauze, the oversized syringes
in their antiseptic plastic packs –
the trappings of your life now –
on the sideboard where my picture
used to sit in its spit-polished frame.
I never came, because I hated you
and this was your house,
so I didn’t see, but I hope
it was every bit this bad, and worse.


*


A spell for the rejected


Reject me the way the chainsaw
rejects the oak’s claim
to the land. Stand
in the clearing, knee-deep
in the dawn’s breath, and rev
yourself into readiness.
Sink your mechanical teeth in
and fell me, then fetch
the red can of paraffin from the truck
you hid in the field. Feel
nothing as the liquid seeps
through my sunk roots fat
as biceps in the fragrant earth. Know
the fox may cry out
at this new scent – the rooks
will escape the canopy via
the dead white space you’ve left.
Haul everything into the sun and split
and split and split with disgust’s
long axe. Bury your cowardice
at the stump. Be the one
to make sure I never grow back.


*


Mothers of sons


The thing I think about most is who
will care for my no-longer mother-in-law
when she’s too thin-skinned for driving,
or cold rain, or walks. She’s a while,
but it’s coming soon enough
that he and I discussed it, nights,
in bed. His mother’s hearing failing
scared him: this is adulthood, he said,
and I thought of my some-day care
for this woman I loved because she made
his mind, his two good steady hands.
She only had sons: one overseas, the other
forgetting when Mother’s Day was,
standing her up, me at the worktop
rinsing his shirts and cursing
this girl I’d become. His mother
worked through my hazy long-term plan
like an overlocked seam. But now I’m gone.

Perhaps in time there’ll be another girl
he’ll take to brunch, show off, and hold
in the dark of his mother’s sparse
spare room. I think of her, stronger than me
and slim, lifting his mother up out of a chair
in an afternoon filled with low orange sun,
then turning to the kitchen where the medicine
rattles its powdery light. Might I
be in another town by then,
counting change from another
old lady’s purse, guiding her down
from a bus, wrists so fragile
in her new wool gloves?
I’ll see in her face the frown of a man
I don’t yet love, have yet to meet –
and might I steer her home to the house
where he was born, to brew strong tea
as dusk floods under the doors?

And somewhere my own mother,
waiting for my brother’s call.
And somewhere my ex forgetting his mum
can’t hear: stood on the porch,
one hand on the bell, while a thin rain sugars in,
come down-country from me to him.
 

    9     Domonic

    13     Nessie to the unaccompanied minor
    14     Playing it cool
    15     The flirt
    16     Hand of Glory
    18     Christopher’s rules for skimming stones, which are also rules for living
    20     The women who’ve loved you
    22     A Field Journal of Witches
    24     Travel poem
    27     Devils
    29     The affair
    31     Giles Corey
    32     Thornfield
    33     Knife
    35     May
    37     A spell for the departed
    38     Sarah Good
    41     A spell to honour your foremothers
    43     You can’t always get what you want
    44     Rodney
    45     Motorcycle jacket
    47     The neighbours of Ursula Kemp
    49     Hot rod
    50     Dean
    52     Coming second
    54     Merga Bien
    55     A spell for the rejected
    56     Mothers of sons
    58     Show me again
    60     Eunice Cole
    62     Men
    64     A spell for preparing to sleep alone in an unfamiliar house
    66     Things men want to hear you say
    68     Whisky
    69     Watching the red kite trying to fly
    70     Phone sex
    72     Anne Askew
    74     Men of the rack
    76     Fletcher Mathers
    78     Listening to Rainymood in Waverley Station
    79     A spell for obedience
    80     Janet Horne
    81     Big hands
    82     Library
    83     A spell for the unbelieved
    85     How to burn a woman

    89     Foreplay

    93     Acknowledgements

‘Claire Askew doesn’t mince words: she revels in them, pretty or dirty, and hammers them into strange and kenspeckle amulets, talismans against loss, death, isolation…. Looking into the future with ‘no innocence’, haunted by the past, the allusive, mysterious work at the core of this collection will take Claire Askew far.’ – Pippa Little, The Lake, on This changes things

'This changes things is, admirably, a feminist collection - deeply concerned with women's lives, in all their strength and vulnerability.  But Askew has a capacious eye; in the slow-burning second half of the book... some strong poems documenting travel... suggest a poet whose next steps are attractively difficult to predict... Askew is the real thing, and everyone should buy this debut.' - Kathryn Gray, Magma on This changes things

‘…an excellent debut from a promising new voice in Scottish poetry.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement, on This changes things