But, oh, to live awhile as marrow
in someone else’s bones,
to breathe her breath upon the mirror held up to your life,
Pauletta Hansel
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, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal and One, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018), and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.