Pauletta Hansel

Pauletta Hansel

HARLAN COUNTY, USA (2019)

Maybe it is a revelation to you,

but miners know how to stop a train.

Maybe you think that love of coal

means love of the company.

Let me tell you what we love

about coal.

It’s the paycheck.

The one we don’t have.

It’s the food

that’s not on the table,

the new backpack

that won’t be on his back,

my boy’s first day of school.

The doctor his granny

won’t be seeing for her heart.

Remember, we’re used to the dark.

We can see inside your pockets

lined from the coal we dug for free.

We can see the car on the track

filled up from the mine

you pulled us out of.

As long as it’s sitting there,

our hard work inside it,

we’ll be sitting here.

—from Poets Respond
August 4, 2019

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Pauletta Hansel: “Some phrases are from ‘No pay, we stay; Protesting miners in Harlan County are not going anywhere.’ The mine from which the coal is blocked from leaving belongs to Revelation Energy LLC, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on July 1st along with its affiliate Blackjewel LLC; its last paycheck to the miners for the coal they dug bounced. Though the poem is addressed to the company, this action has given me hope—a revelation of sorts—that even in so-called ‘Trump Country,’ the spirit of Appalachia activism has not died.” (web)

Pauletta Hansel

I CONFESS

These days I think too much

about assassination, and let me just say

I have come down against it every time,

swatting it away, a plague-ridden fly

in my otherwise mild and law-abiding imagination,

and that I do not accept the legal argument

that targeted killings are a country’s form

of self-defense, regardless of whether the target

will ever see the inside of a detention center,

and be faced with deciding, like thousands

of seven-year-olds, whether the assigned Mylar blanket

goes over or under on the mud-caked concrete floor.

Every time, I rise up on the right side of the question

though I have gone so far as to research the word:

From the Arabic, hashshashin, the Assassins of Persia,

perhaps so-named for the necessity of getting high

before slipping in the blade. (In private,

some Border Patrol agents consider migrant deaths

a laughing matter; others are succumbing to depression,

anxiety, or substance abuse.)

How, with or without the name, the act

is older than our ability to write it down.

How way back in the Old Testament,

there it was alongside the begetting and begats.

How in the Roman Empire, strangling in the bathtub

was the method of choice for murdering one’s king,

while, as you might expect, in Japan it was the sword.

Here in the U.S. we, as always,

prefer the gun, and let me just say,

I do not and will not own one.

I confess only to the image in my mind

of the mongrel dogs of history lapping at the wound.

—from Poets Respond
July 7, 2019

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Pauletta Hansel: “I think the poem mostly speaks for itself, and that pretty much terrifies me.” (web)

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

August 6, 2019

July 7, 2019