The guillotine is quick. Shutter down. A cut with clean blade.
An historical terror. Spills little of her blood.

The bullet – it whizzes past him. Sprints to plot a hole in her flesh
and before he blinks she is done in.

He prefers the fencing sword – known as Flynn’s épée –
to slash air, have artistry when expertly thrust at her heart.

Not the noose – rope choker – too rough. Almost banal it tightens,
winches her up with a jolt. Asphyxiation without restoration.

And being burnt at the stake is no better an end –
heated smoke and liquid flame – reduces her to ash and fat.

Then there’s the coward that is poison,
hiding in disguise as something too palatable, even for her.

           But she knows
it will happen another way –
by nature, by ripple, by suction, by weed-clogging,
by swallowing a tide of water to her lungs.

           The missing premonition –
the skin of the witches’ fable,
water stretched over the pond,
is this daughter’s death reflected in its mirror.

Jane R Rogers has been writing poetry for seven years. Jane is a member of the Greenwich Poetry Workshop and was a member of the Magma Poetry magazine team where she co-edited Magma 65. Jane’s poems have appeared in Atrium, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears, Long Exposure Magazine, Obsessed with Pipework, in Greenwich Poetry Workshop’s anthologies and in the Tate Gallery Website poetry anthology 2012. Jane lives in London but misses the West Country.