By Fire

When I pass an abandoned, half-wrecked building,

on a waste-lot, in winter, the smell of the cold

rot decides me - I am not going

to rot. I will not lie down in the ground

with the cauliflower and the eggshell mushroom,

and grow a fungus out of my stomach

steady as a foetus, my face sluicing off of me,

my Calvinist lips blooming little

broccolis, my hair growing,

my nails growing into curls of horn, so there is

always movement in my grave. If the worm

were God, let it lope, slowly, through my flesh, if its

loping were music. But I was near, when ferment

moved, in its swerving tunnels, through my father,

nightly, I have had it with that,

I am going to burn, I am going to pour my

body out as fire, as fierce

pain not felt I am leaving. The hair

will fizzle around my roasting scalp, with a

head of garlic in my pocket I am going out.

And I know what happens in the fire closet,

when the elbow tendons shrink in the heat, and I

want it to happen - I want, dead, to

pull up my hands in fists, I want

to go out as a pugilist.

~Sharon Olds, "Blood, Tin, Straw"

{"Bonfire" by Howlitzer, Deviantart}