“Stop. Go put your shoes back on. They’ll know we Okies,” a Lost Image Reclamation
Copyright © 2022 by Anthony Cody. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
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hw s th flyng thng splld?
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ll th sft lttrs hv blwn ff
spll brd
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2020
El Arpa, a Mexican Lynching, No. 53
“The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office.”
-Jeff Sessions, former U.S. Attorney General, February 12, 2018 to the National Sheriffs’ Association
1. The inheritance of the heir is never a dandelion disbursal. Scattershot. Floating beyond fences. Growing elsewhere.
2. The inheritance of the elsewhere is a cave of collapse.
2020
Artifacts on a Hanging Tree, Goliad, Texas (a series of 70 Mexican Lynchings, 1857)
“Site for court sessions at various times from 1846 to 1870. Capital sentences called for by the courts were carried out immediately, by means of a rope and a convenient limb. Hangings not called for by regular coursts occurred here during the 1857 “cart war”—a series of attacks made by Texas freighters against Mexican drivers along the Indianola-Goliad/San Antonion Road.
About 70 men were killed, some of them on this tree, before the war was halted by Texas Rangers.”
—State Historical Survey Committee Texas Marker near the tree
2020