A Weakness Within1
Teetering on the fulcrum of
fact and farewell you
were bruised in the
head and the heel with
the bleak ceremony of
words crowning scapegoats, their
Indifference to the possibility
of accidents, hardened hearts
slapping the bloodied letters of dying
psalms through and back, while
balancing on the moment strung
Between breath and
atonement, the humble set of
your jaw was stronger than
their clenched teeth coated
with the bloodcaul of
ignored innocence
Two simple men2
facing death with
stomach bouncing up
hot to scald back of
the throat, two simple men
In the throes of (l)earning
justice, somewhere past gurgling
vespers of doublecrossed faith
fleshy thud rocking
inner eyeseam, shadows beginning to
curl up at the edges, cradling
the memory of repeat screams and
With the anguished formula
of the muscle spasm still
clearly mapping our faults
we may yet learn
the meaning of guilt, that
underbelly of blame, or
Get beyond the echoes
and trace the fiction
back to its truth —
the lights that flickered
to a wan death
were not electric3
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- Herbert Ehrmann, a lawyer in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, resisted a changed verdict (even after innocence was proven) because it would have "signaled a weakness within the social order."
- Sacco, a shoe repairman, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were wrongly convicted of murder in 1920 and electrocuted in Massachusetts in 1927. The three main points proving their guilt in the case: (1) they were poor, (2) they were Italian immigrants, (3) they were anarchists.
- The flow of electricity from the electrocution chair was rumored to be strong enough to make all the lights in eastern Massachusetts flicker. In fact, the lights didn't blink anywhere in the state.
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