Sorry Gets Hooved
Hannah Regel was born in Nottingham and now lives in London. From 2012-2019 she was the co-editor of the feminist art journal SALT. Hannah has two published collections of poetry, When I Was Alive and Oliver Reed (both Montez Press, 2017 and 2020).
“Sorry Gets Hooved” is from Oliver Reed, in which the “figure of the horse becomes an object for language’s brutality and the all too familiar subjugation of women’s voices, bodies, and labour.” (Cassandra Troyan, author of Blacken Me Blacken Me, Growled).
In the opening credits for the 1939 film The Women each woman is depicted as an animal to set the tone. Marjorie Main (housekeeper at a Reno ranch for high class women who’ve failed in love) appears as a yawning horse.
The feet of adult women make impressions in corridors
Little girls want shoes that go clack
A child does not relate the image of it,
hooves, as the echo of shame
we bask in their wrong future
We boil things with hooves,
we sit on them and ride them and make them glue,
we put them inside tracks, shoot saliva at their cash hearts
I join in anyway with my oblivious desire,
banging two coconuts
(Wild light watched from all sides
allowing the subject to become a stain
surveyed everywhere, with age
her carrier bag skin elucidates
dandelions softening in the weft)
The girls are paid to babysit for a woman they have just met
in a car park. They tell the girl they are sitting to say Ass
She says No, they say Do It
The little girl says Ass and then she says Bitch
The girls give the girl they are sitting a makeover
They smear makeup all over her face it looks bad
They are sort of laughing at her while they do it
After this they are bored
They decide to play hide and seek
The little girl’s mother comes back
asks where her daughter is
The girls say they don’t know. It is very dark
when this happens and they are in the woods
I pick the sole off my shoe
to omit one more person
from being a teenage girl
do not look like that, I know
such an ancient and cruel thing
cannot ever be erased
but the fanciest dream of
solitude breaks a lively blood
posing at the headlights
and the swollen hip of poetry
when I am squeezing your knee
when I am being a sucker
when I am wah wah wah
saying softly can you please
warden of your pony mind
and skinny wrists
let me in. Let me show you
the hungers of tiny insects
who live meanly like you do
not knowing about pretty
just crisis and sensation
like you are going to die
every time you bleed
getting spit on your heart
while your sad dad fumbles
and I will myself barren
How do you feel?
I feel angry.
What do you want?
I want to brush my hair
We have laminated for you
everything possible
please point to what you need
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