Oliver Reed

There is a picture of you
behind the bar where we eat French
sausage and are drunk and I think I know
since a child, your huge hairy face,
that I love you very purely. Always have
You smoulder a mobile furnace —
one never thinks, on the screen,
that there on the other side
is an embryo, a living lusting
flesh, being put out of play
because you’ve got a mask on,
                      Oliver Reed
face of the Old Game, birthed
in the crotchet of rape
                       I lift a little finger
And taste the Merguez juice from my chin.


Waiting for Dinner

My brain is woolen and so
is this small glass, a lace for 
the hour, a writing bribe 
Has it beat you out of words? 
Or got you drunk, frantic 
or melancholy. Four lemons 
and a pair low tide, un-known 
purple hands — I’ve stared into 
the promise well for eight years now, 
asked for money politely 
each day. Art is a joke 
only the rich find funny, 
an eating contest: embodied 
responses to faking it, 
in a dark but profitable 
world. I take out a hair pin 
And get to work against a 
wooden scene. Everyone I know 
has one finger in the revolution 
and the other in their own eye 
— singing I’m an optimist, honest, 
I ate my twin in the womb

Hannah Regel is a poet and artist based in London. She holds a BA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths College and a MFA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art. Her writing has been published in Eros Journal, Two Serious Ladies, Leste Magazine, Montez Press Interjection Calendar, The Literateur, Form IV and The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. Her first collection of poetry, When I Was Alive, was published in December 2017 by Montez Press. She is also the coeditor of the feminist journal SALT.