NO FRIENDS OF COAL

by Pauletta Hansel

LOST CREEK, KY. — Families along Upper River Caney and Lower River Caney roads recall how the floodwaters that rushed through their narrow hollow turned from a muddy brown to a charcoal gray late last month. Within minutes of the color change, the water rose so high that it picked up homes, cars, sheds, boulders, trees, staircases, swingsets and swimming pools. The debris turned into dangerous projectiles as the water rushed down through the community. Many residents fled into the mountainside and waited out the storm as the ashy water and mud cascaded down the hills that surrounded them. One person from the community is still missing, and another was killed. Officials expect Breathitt County to be without water utilities until December…. Now 59 people who live in this narrow hollow hope to hold Blackhawk Mining and its subsidiary Pine Branch Mining, which together operate a nearby coal mine, accountable…. The plaintiffs allege that the failure of the companies’ silt ponds, aggravated by the mining operation’s damage to the land, led to the widespread destruction of their community and the contamination of their drinking water. Photo: Tatyn Skidmore carries Brelyn Hays on his shoulders outside their home in the Upper River Caney community of Lost Creek, KY., on August 18. Credit: Michael Swensen). NBC News, August 23, 2022.

“What a Friend we have in Jesus, / All our sins and griefs to bear!” Traditional hymn.

 

“And he shall break down the house, its stones and timber and all the plaster of the house, and he shall carry them out of the city to an unclean place.” Leviticus 14:45

 

 

And when the unclean place

is the silt pond

up by the strip mine and the grey

of its waters broke free

from its rickety dam

and carried away your house built

wise as you could, what else but a lawsuit 

to carry the blame

back up the shorn mountain

where it belongs?

 

“What a friend we have in…”

 

Jesus wept

and I’m willing to wager he would again

at Blackhawk Coal and their claims

of “our people” and “deeply impacted,”

their sympathies and their support.

And the mud had not dried

when they posted their notice

“Intent To Blast”

over where the door stoop had been

before the flood.

 

I know there was rain,

too much, too fast,

another one of those 1000-year floods,

but what kind of flood

carries its little ashy silt pond fishes

down from what’s left of the mountain,

not up from the creek?

 

“Within minutes of the color change, the water rose so high

that it picked up homes, cars, sheds, boulders, trees,

staircases, swing sets and swimming pools.”

 

So, yes, I’m feeling biblical,

Old and New,

calling on Jesus

to back up his people,

once clothed and fed by coal.

The ones who lost everything

there on Lost Creek, along River Caney.

The ones that are fixing to lose

every friend they thought they had.

 

“And the Philistine said to David, Come to me,

and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air,

and to the beasts of the field.” 1 Samuel 17:44

 

“No Friends of Coal”

reads the headline about the lawsuit

in the local weekly paper

underneath the photo of what used to be

that young man’s house,

now torn down to its timbers,

its moldy plaster spread out on the stony ground,

the raptors circling just beyond the frame.

 

That young man’s name is not David.

I wish he were David, delivered

“out of the paw of the lion,

and out of the paw of the bear,”

and “out of the hand of this Philistine.”

 

“What a friend we have in…”

 

Brother, I am here to tell you,

no matter the money they used to pay,

you don’t have a friend in coal.

Poet Pauletta Hansel writes: Driving back through my southeastern Kentucky hometown from doing some flood relief work I picked up the weekly paper with the headline, “No Friends of Coal: River Caney residents file lawsuit.” After letting out a cheer, I started thinking about what a headline like that meant for those 59 plaintiffs in eastern Kentucky where coal is second only to Jesus. My Sunday School lessons started coming back to me, including the hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”  I drew on national news for many of the details in this poem.

AERIAL VIEW OF CATASTROPHIC FLOODING IN EASTERN KENTUCKY

by Pauletta Hansel

Quicksand, Bulan, Neon, Hiner, Martin, Fisty.

This is our place in Hueysville.

This was my Mother’s house before she passed.

Samantha’s sister’s house is by that blue bridge.

Anyone know anything about Fugate’s Fork Road?

Stringtown, Ajax, Isom, Pinetop, Dwarf.

This is my cousin’s house. 

My Mamaw’s house is on the left.

That bridge is about 8 feet above

where the creek’s supposed to be. 

Isn't this Mary's house?

This is the mouth of our hollow,

the red arrow was our road in.

Nix Branch, Jakes Branch, Trot.

If you zoom in to where the white car hood is,

my home is there.

Rowdy, Wayland, Noble’s Landing Cowan Creek.

OMG that is Pigeon Roost.

Y’all this is my hometown.

This little tree, and God, kept us alive this morning.

My daughter swam with her dog to a neighboring rooftop.

Caney, Possum, Ary, Lost Creek, Hardburly, Trace.

Dad and my nephew are neck deep

they need help

please.

Are you all safe??

We lost the farm animals and 5 cats.

Lost my chainsaws so I can't even work.

Hindman, Buckhorn, Chavis.

You need to understand the nature of the topography.

Add to that strip mining, climate change, political neglect.

Krypton, Garrett, over toward Pound.

Does anyone know about Kite, KY?

We have lost everything

again.

We have warm beds, clothes, and toiletries available.

We have hot showers and food.

Anyone trapped in downtown Whitesburg is welcome to come.

We need help and I'm willing to help anyone

in the same shape we are.

Your prayers are good

but we need to get federal and state assistance ASAP.

Don’t cry for Appalachia, work for change however you can!

Let's use the internet to tell our story.

Thank you for posting.

Much love and many blessings to you all

from what's left.

 

Poet Pauletta Hansel writes “This poem is made up of direct quotes from posts about the devastating flooding in eastern Kentucky. Appalachia tends to hit the news briefly, if at all, during disasters, and is soon forgotten. If you haven’t heard of any of these places, you’d better get on Facebook quick, before we disappear again. Want to help? Go to Appalshop.”

FIRE

A Poem for Ada Limón, using her words

by Pauletta Hansel

Ada Limón Is Named the Next Poet Laureate: Poetry, she said, can help the nation “become whole again” in a fraught, divided moment. Photo by Carla Ciuffo for The New York Times, July 12, 2022

                                

Sometimes I imagine all my lovely poets 

out there in the world of their bodies

having a poetry party

with dry red wine uncorked and pimento cheese 

spread out on a warm lawn, or gathered 

around the inside of a picture window,

still black water holding the stars, 

talking poems made 

            in the white heat of the moment… or 

            written from inside the well ...

Reminding themselves that

            when things are bad, 

            we still have our words

            and each other.

And then I get on Facebook

and I see it really is true. 

            When the day calls for fire 

            and your friends have all the matches 

            to burn it down, Ada posts,

and I know these friends,

some of them anyway,

and the R.J Corman rail line

running by her house,

            surrounded by wild things, 

            green trees, grasses.

 

But never mind my invitation

lost on the internet,

I’ll read myself in

between the lines—

            “If you want to win anything—your race, your self, your life—

            you have to go a little berserk”—this woman even gets good fortune cookies, 

and on the radio now Ada Limón is talking 

about female rage and how

                        sometimes we need

                        to step into that room and make ourselves

                        fully known and fully seen.

 

Even “The Onion” loves this woman, the railroad spike

bisecting Trump’s hypothalamus and he calls a meeting 

to name her poet laureate.

            When we name things we are more tender to them…

            But I am also aware of the hubris of naming things.

 

She’s not my friend,

even though she seems to live inside my body,

            more tired than I should be, 

            …hurting more, 

            my brain keeps saying 

            “this country hates women, 

                        this country hates women”

                                    over and over…

            And of course women are hesitant

            about our subject matter. 

            Of course we are. 

            We’ve been taught that from the very beginning

to ask ourselves,

            Should I take the “I” out? Should I erase my being?

But there she is, Ada Limón, singing the song 

of our shared bones, and, yes,

sometimes the song 

is enough.

Author's Notes:

Italicized lines are from the following sources: 

Ada Limón's Facebook timeline, October 2018

https://soundcloud.com/kutnews/this-is-just-to-say-ada-limon-and-carrie-fountain https://www.cleavermagazine.com/a-conversation-with-ada-limon-author-of-the-carrying-interview-by-grant-clauser/

https://politics.theonion.com/calm-measured-trump-hard-at-work-after-freak-accident-1829686798

“The Poetry of Perseverance: An Interview with Ada Limón,” Poets & Writers September/October 2018.

 

The final lines reference “A New National Anthem,” The Carrying, by Ada Limon

 

Pauletta Hansel’s newest poetry collection is Heartbreak Tree, an exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. Her writing is featured in Oxford American, Rattle, The New Verse News and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate and is 2022 Writer-in-Residence for The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library. 

MUNDUS NOVUS

by Pauletta Hansel

In this Oct. 27, 2020 photo, artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg walks among thousands of white flags planted near RFK Memorial Stadium in Washington in remembrance of Americans who have died of COVID-19. Credit: Patrick Semansky, AP via The Detroit News, December 14, 2020.

300,000 US dead, I read

this morning (old news

by the time you read these words).

This pandemic’s

in month nine, fully gestated.

The curve of it ready to pop.

My husband, the historian, 

looks across the table at me,

tells me this won’t be the last pandemic

of our lifetime, this won’t be the worst.

We’re in our sixties now. How much longer

does the next one have to find us?

Twenty, thirty years?

How many of them would we choose

to claim, years not given up to pills and tubes,

the cancer that his mother didn’t fight,

the dementia that wrote the ending

of both my parents’ stories?

I pick up again the book

that names my New World kin—

Ezekiel, Margaret—

newlywed and not among

300 grisly dead that year,

Jamestown, 1622, settlers

with their own weapons slain,

the Powhatan’s wasted dose

of our own medicine

to rid themselves of our encroaching whiteness.

Rapacious is the word

the author gives to my ancestral 

plundering of the world 

that was not new or ours,

and even now we thrust our will

across this landscape, not unlike the virus

we no longer call novel.  

Pauletta Hansel’s eighth poetry collection is Friend, epistolary poems written in the early days of the pandemic; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, and The New Verse News, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (2010-2020).

PANDEMIC: A DICTIONARY GUIDE

by Pauletta Hansel

John Tenniel illustration for "Jabberwocky"

In poetry talk we call it “word-play,” 

tricking nouns up adverbial,  and verbing the adjectives  

till they gyre and gimble in the wabe,

but there’s no play at play here.

Example of PANDEMIC in a sentence:

In the middle months of 2020, the use of the former adjective as noun

was pandemic.

Facebook posts about the COVID-19 disease, AKA coronavirus

were pandemic.

Grief over the untimely death of (fill in the blank) was … 

You get the point.  Let’s move on.

There’s no place to go. 

Time Travel for PANDEMIC: 

The first known use was as an adjective in 1666.

See more words from the same year:

            Irresoluble

            Uninstructive

            Grotesquerie

            Auld lang syne

Take your choice of neighbors: PANDEMONIUM or PANDER.

Example of PANDER in a sentence:

A few Republican governors chose to stop pandering 

to their country’s demagogue (the frumious Bandersnatch) 

and serve the people instead.

A Dictionary Guide to Coronavirus Related Words: Deciphering the Terminology You Are Likely to Hear:

            Social Distancing

            Superspreader

            Contact Tracing

            Fomite “Rhymes with ‘toe blight.’” (Yes, the dictionary really says that.)

            Martial law (The martial part of which 

            comes from Mars, the god of war, whereas the pan

            in pandemic is unrelated to the goat-headed god 

                        The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

            of the wild.)

History and Etymology for PANDEMIC

            From the Greek:

            pan      +          demos 

                        =

            all        +          people

            More at DEMAGOGUE

(Told you: No place to go.)      

Author's Notes: Obviously, the italicized lines are from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”  The dictionary used for this poem was https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pandemic.  While there are a number of news sources for the demagoguery in our nation, here’s a recent one about a Republican governor continuing to take a reasonable stance: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2020/05/06/coronavirus-ohio-dr-amy-acton-house-limit-power/5175125002/. I also find it interesting that the dictionary chose “toe blight” as its rhyme example before the news appearance of COVID toes: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/05/06/850707907/from-loss-of-smell-to-covid-toes-what-experts-are-learning-about-symptoms

Pauletta Hansel’s seven poetry collections include Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award. Her writing has been featured in Rattle and Still: The Journal, and on The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016- 2018). In Poetry Month 2020 she worked with the current Poet Laureate to curate Cincinnati’s Postcards from the Pandemic Project. 

POSTCARD FROM THE PANDEMIC

by Pauletta Hansel




Crabgrass beneath the iris rhizomes
where my muddy fingers
can’t tell one root from another.
Meanwhile, down in the French Quarter
the rats are starving.
No tourists, no trash.
What can they do but feed on their young?
Everything wants to survive.

Inside our lungs the virus slips
itself into the Ace-2 receptors and is remade.
Scientists call what happens next a cytokine storm.
Bugler, sound the charge! An army of cells
march up from the trenches,
destroy what they can’t save.
“We have to think about this pandemic from the virus’s position.”
All it wants to do is to eat us alive.

Pauletta Hansel’s seven poetry collections include Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award. Her writing has been featured in Rattle and Still: The Journal, and on The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016- 2018).