June 25, 7 p.m.


Pauletta Hansel & Ellen Austin-Li


at MOTR

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​PAULETTA HANSEL is author of seven poetry collections, including Coal Town Photograph (Dos Madres Press, 2019) and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017), winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for best Appalachian poetry book. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016- 2018) and is artist in residence at Thomas More University. She is managing editor of Pine Moun­tain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and leads writing workshops and retreats in the Greater Cincinnati area and beyond. 

The Road
 
Where I’m from, everybody had a flower garden,
and I’m not talking about landscaping--
those variegated grasses poking up between
the yellow daylilies that bloom more than once.
Even the rusted-out trailer down in the green bottoms
had snowball bushes that outlived the floods.
Even the bootlegger’s wife grew roses up the porch pillar
still flecked with a little paint, and in the spring
her purple irises rickracked the rutted gravel drive.
Even the grannies changed out of their housedresses
to thin the sprouts of zinnias so come summer
they’d bloom into muumuus of scarlet and coral
down by the road.
 
Now driving that road that used to take me home,
I think how maybe it’s still true.
Everybody says down here it’s nothing
but burnt-out shake and bakes and skinny girls
looking for a vein, but everywhere I look
there’s mallows and glads, begonias in rubber tire
planters painted to match, cannies red
as the powder my mother would pat high
on her cheekbones when she wanted to be noticed
for more than her cobblers and beans.
Everywhere there’s some sort of beautiful
somebody worked hard at, no matter
how many times they were told
nobody from here even tries.
 

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​ELLEN AUSTIN-LI an award-winning poet published in Artemis, Writers Tribe Review, The Maine Review, Mothers Always Write, Memoir Mixtapes, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Masque & Spectacle, and other places. Her first poetry chapbook, Firefly, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2019. Ellen is active at Women Writing for a Change in Cincinnati and studies poetry in multiple ongoing workshops. She lives in Clifton with her husband and two sons.


Hymn
 
We must have our own version of a higher power.
I find mine in the silence of snowflakes
hushing over a city,
or a divine moment like entering into fragrant woods
stippled by sunlight.
I, too, crave rain,
when the mist kisses my skin,
until I feel bathed like a newborn baby.
I’m a sinner willing
to be baptized again by a new God,
tears couched in raindrops.
Other times, sun’s heat penetrates me,
cicadas buzz like electric currents in the air,
energy jolting, or better put, power resurging,
singing a hymn that I am
not a low hum but,
oh, so much more luminous
than I once believed. 
 
-inspired by Jeanne Wagner’s “Fanlight” 

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Launched by poets Mark Flanigan and Jim Palmarini in 2014, Word of Mouth  was inspired by the late Cincinnati poet Aralee Strange. Poets of all stripes are welcome to show up, listen, and mouth off.

MOTR Pub, 1345 Main Street, Cincinnati