Appalachia Re-Visioned

Pauletta Hansel

We never knew ourselves
as they did. We didn’t know our faces
and floors should be dirt, our red
brick homes, pink geraniums in pots
along the patio walls, should be great-granny’s
mud-chinked cabin or a rusted trailer listing
by a pitted road,  either way, a row of beans
out back, one for every young’un to hoe.
We didn’t know our very names could conjure
photos, black and white in glossy magazines,
our creeks and towns strange stones
rolled against our nation’s tongue—
Elkatawa, Hardshell, Keck. 
What else did we not know?
That one man pillaring coal beneath a mountain
was no different than another
man beneath some other mountain,
that all that matters is black numbers,
row by row in someone else’s bank.
We only knew ourselves to be enough
until we weren’t
and then we saw ourselves
packed tight with all the othered ones
who surely in today’s America
only had themselves
to blame.

Pauletta Hansel is author of seven poetry collections, including Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award. Her writing has been featured in journals including Rattle, Appalachian Journal and Still: The Journal, and on The Writer's Almanac, American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Cincinnati's first Poet Laureate, 2016-2018, Pauletta is artist in residence at Thomas More University, in her home state of Kentucky, and is managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. Her earliest poems were published while she was part of the Soupbean Poets of Antioch College/Appalachian, in Beckley West, Virginia. More about her writing, writing workshops and retreats can be found at https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.