georgia

When they hanged the black man from Roopville, my mama burned
all the white curtains in the house and buried the ashes under a rattleweed,
and said He will send the teeth of beasts upon them.  

Then those Clifford boys strung their shoelaces
together and rolled their sister’s Kewpie in mud
and left her swinging from a yellow poplar;

      you wouldn’t think honey could roll so slowly in the middle of summer
      but then you remember that honey ain’t sweat, and it sure ain’t blood.  
      And you could hear the bees for days.

They hanged that man for resting his chin on fence of a woman
whose husband used to hold her head
under bathwater, while he dyed his brown shoes unrecognizable.

(A couple years later, that lady’s husband caught some guilt
between his collarbones, and choked to death on the Flint River,
the same year all those folks died in a shark’s mouth on the Jersey Shore.)

Then there was the other man, who walked the crooked road
and used to drink under the café porch with a vixen and four kits
and hadn’t been straight since Lucy banned gambling in the White House.

Well, he saw it happen and lost his ear falling from a Mulberry they’d set on fire
so he took to thinking he was Moses
and that the Holy Father lived up in that charred tree and his baby girl,
when she was old enough, used to cut crosses
into the grass and fill ‘em with red dirt.

After they hanged that man from Roopville, and my mama burned the curtains,
she went and burned the bacon.  
And you couldn’t tell where the smoke was comin’ from anymore,
and what flesh was aflame.