Outside the City’s Perimeter
For R.F.

I. Atlanta, GA, March 14, 2009

We gathered at The Colonnade
on Cheshire Bridge Road
to feast on collard greens, black-eyed peas,
fried okra, and poetry.
When I told them I lived
in Marietta, one of the city poets
at the far end of the table
locked eyes with mine and said:
that’s where the hanging tree
was, where the Big Chicken is now.
Our landmark: a scarlet and white fowl
as tall as a loblolly pine,
attached to a KFC.
Once a tornado ripped away
the chicken’s googly eye,
tore off strips of sheet-metal feathers,
but the city restored the historic bird.
To find your way in Marietta,
everyone will tell you to turn at the Big Chicken,
two miles west of the square.

*II. Atlanta, GA, June 9, 1915.

In RE Leo M. Frank
APPLICATION FOR EXECUTIVE CLEMENCY
TO HIS EXCELLENY, THE GOVERNOR:
SIR;
The Prison Commission have had
under consideration
an application for clemency
in behalf of Leo M. Frank
who at the July term, 1913
of the Superior Court
of Fulton County, was convicted
of Murder,
and sentenced to Hang,
and beg leave to report that they
Decline to Recommend Clemency
Respectfully submitted
The Prison Commission

III. Marietta, GA, June, 1973

My disclaimer, I wanted to tell the in-town poets,
is that my family moved to Cobb County
from Chicago, carpetbaggers
like Leo Frank sixty years
before us. I was thirteen,
as old as Mary Phagan,
the Marietta pencil factory worker
police said Frank raped and murdered.
In eighth-grade social studies
Miss Christy didn’t teach us
about Mary or Leo Frank,
or how some good ole boys from Marietta,
when the governor granted him life,
plucked Frank from a Milledgeville jail
under night’s plush carpet,
drove him to the county seat,
and hanged him from an oak tree
at Frey’s Gin, two miles west of the square.

* A scanned document found on Georgia’s Virtual Vault, an online archive, reproduced here with line breaks but no other changes. In 1986 The Georgia Department of Pardons and Paroles posthumously pardoned Leo Frank in an effort to heal old wounds, acknowledging that the State had failed to bring Frank’s murderers to trial, and had failed to protect the person of Leo Frank.

**

If Ophelia were from Georgia

It might have happened like this,
that she does a drunken electric slide
down the hill till she reaches
the creek’s edge, wedges a sneaker
into a dogwood’s vee,
hoists herself onto a limb.
Filches buds to weave a garland,
scoots across knotted bark,
cracks off twigs as she seesaws
toward the water.

I swear, that man’s a dog, she hums
and tries to pin down
her reflection in eddies
dark from silt and rain.
Who the hell is he to tell me
to straighten up?
And then the branch snaps –
she drops into the creek.

Serene in the whirlpool,
gazing at a hazy sky,
she sings herself to sleep.
White petals snow
on a bed of pine needles
the day they find her body.