Two Serious Ladies is named for the 1943 short novel by Jane Bowles.

“I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.”


― Jane Bowles
Two Serious Ladies

 

Strictures by Hannah Regel

First it was in the bathroom, then the kitchen. The membranes elucidate: lodged in the mucus and bleeding into the lungs. Boring holes into the present. In the Book of Leviticus I am told that if they had found you on a stone within a house the stone would have been taken out of the house, then the stone would have been taken out of the city. I am kinder, my sourness empathic. I think of you like an accoutrement. Your presence is a signifier it says Hell here but also never mind. There is no edge besides we both grow regardless

Hacking and Hewing

Cow-like and Leaking

So so so stilted.

I want to take pride

In my badness you

Know, get to the log-

Ical extreme

Howling

With the Omm inside

Everything living.

The continuous

Moo of sameness, “I”

Longing for the Lazy

To dislodge still gut

In the knowing flow

Generative release

This house is a trap

My body a desk

The hole in my belly

Ache is an inkwell

The cavity of

My sex drawers (meaning)

With reasonable

Fidelity, you

Fill it with your work

And I name the secret

Ions security.

See how the strictures are always in your favour and love it, we try. Chew 30 times and down. I was not supposed to occur except in flames or in lightning and yet what is this instruction. Wipe the mould off the lemon. ok I see well now it has gone inside me too late. They look like me bent over and I caress them free of their attempts at formal change. I want to live in this world not simply but with hair that shimmers. When I carry their spit backs on my open hips under the sovereign moon I feel brave. It will be a memory I cherish for the comparison, let me. Faces, which are soft and white and bloodless do not see anything and grow tanked — theirs: I hew on you on your Patron fuck you and your sociality. I feel alone inside the Internet and it bothers me.

Everyone is burning trash and building houses in the places where I go to hide. Where is my mother who will fill me with petrol, like hers before her so I can continue, tightly bound.

O tender filament. The walls are alive: black powder veins pumping the liquid that is for us that we will suckle from this flat dank udder we call a home.

I am going to plaster cast my indifference to dying and skewer it.    

Hannah Regel is an artist and writer living and working in London. She also co-founded and co-edits the feminist journal SALT.

Tower Records by Vanessa Norton

Freinds by Caren Beilin