Digital Poetics #11 Anyway, the birds live: Hannah Regel
1.
I’ll be speaking aloud you say, so ignore me
Then you shut the door and open a valve
In the beginning I felt something
Subversive like glee. Sable-black, unteachable
Now my lung aches the news
I address my reflection: Hello Dad,
Have you removed yourself sufficiently?
He says yes but I don’t believe him
I can see wind circles on his bald head
His colleague interrupts covered in snow
Blowing a great horn. Like Nastassja Kinski
My eye films glaze the booth, “I just don’t think
I’m the one you wanna talk to.”
*
I pee before eating in an unscientific attempt
To be empty. Weight is the first danger
The final protest. Picking for seeds and twigs
I want to be small enough to be carried, remembered
That is all I live for
To be made miniature
By the gravity of your fancy and buried
In the lap (as for the future)
Your memory hefts us apart
I try to bridge it with texts and then with telling
But your brain remains indifferent
It is how you managed to build such a big castle
In the first site of family, all women, applause
No one would dare to call your worn in will déjà vu
I cannot warn
About misunderstanding
To you, everyone is unnamed. Getting in the way
Of your mouthful stories. To repeat the sequence
I have married into the talking cure sideways
I am so much worse than the analysts’ daughter, now
I am the dealer’s wife
But I am not unhinged
I have a cock-eyed stare at things
Furrowing the howed brow of not fair
Into the hole of an 8 ball
What a thin slice of crap
One of these days I’ll get organised
Make gleaning thought fulfilling again
Be obsessed. But who can think at a desk
They say that angels are the spaces between things
(a tissue, a tissue)
My heart gives way to the roof.
2.
Rolled up, my drunkenness lives
Tight beneath my clothes
An extra limb, it flops out
Onto the table sometimes
When my inhibitions go and they do
Inside learning that first stain
All stains being farcical/Babies walking
Breasts puffed up, shoulders wagging
And who could be prouder?
The waste that is luxury
The loaf left unwrapped
Hard little bites.
*
At Dinner
I reach for what is beyond
The silly mark of my life
Like a dropped rock
Speaking. He
Judgemental as a child
Shuts me up with the swiftness
Of tossing a salad,
“I can’t be interested
In your exercises at what if”
I take the olive pip from my mouth
And plug his ear with it.
*
Birds are ugly but that is not why I kill
I didn’t see the eggs, I say
I didn’t know the twigs had purpose
I have put rubbish all over what I did not know
Cigarette ends, stray hair and bottle caps
A casserole dish
You just don’t think he says you never think
It’s true I never think!
Anyway, the birds live
So no one needs my mind.
*
Hannah Regel co-edited of the feminist art Journal SALT. from 2012-2019. She has two published collections of poetry,When I Was Alive and Oliver Reed (both Montez Press, 2017 and 2020).
*
This publication is in Copyright. Hannah Regel, 2020.
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
