POETRY

Great-Grandmother Sestina

By Pauletta Hansel     VOLUME 58 No. 1

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Sarah Margaret Rhoton Mullins, 1879–1925

I am stubborn, grandmother. If buried bones
are all I have of you, I’ll stitch these lines with threads
pulled from the marrow. Kindle
a fire from foraged words. The wilderness
of unkept memory. Let stories not told burn red
as winter sun caught in the tumbling river.

All I know is not enough. A river
bank. Headfirst you thrust clinched bones
through mother flesh, then howl fierce red
as any girl child would before her voice is threaded
shut. For you I’ll choose a childhood—tangled hair, wild
vines to swing from shore to rocky shore, and kin

who love you. Ferocious hopeless love of kin
who let you go as easily as any river
would into the next wild
stream. You are fifteen. Married. Your bones
somebody else’s home before the final threads
of them are fused. How soon after your first red

stained wash water russet red
does he break into your dark hearth? The kindled
self no longer yours alone. Here’s where I lose the thread
of you, grandmother. Fourteen children rivered
through you, flesh and blood and bone.
The eighth a stone along the path to me. A wilderness

of years I cannot clear. Into the wild
of genealogical websites. My eyes are red
from scrolling screens. My Kindle
holds a photograph. I long to see my bones
inside your own. She is not you. A sister river
flowing to another sea. Your mother’s threads

wound onto another skein of threads.
But never mind. I’ll claim you as a skein of wild
geese winging over mountain rivers--
Clinch, Copper, Laurel, Dismal. A smattering of red-
bud, sycamore, purple aster on their banks. Unkind-
ness of ravens to guard your bones.

I sing an unsung song above grandmother
bones. A flame-red kindled thread
of river, wilderness of time.

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PAULETTA HANSEL is a poet, memoirist, and teacher. Her books include Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024), poems of witness and protest; Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publishing, 2022), which won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award; and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017), winner of Berea College’s Weatherford Award in Poetry. Her writing has been featured in The Cincinnati Review, Oxford American, Rattle, Cutleaf, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily, among others. Born and raised in southeastern Kentucky, Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, and the 2022 Writer in Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library. She is a core member of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, and past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.


VOLUME 58 No. 1