Public Record

Public Record

A county council is not unlike

the telephone company: service 

is spotty, but it’s all you get 

around here. 25 years back now

they cut 27 through the frayed fringe

of the battlefield, opening Chattanooga 

Valley, Rossville, Chickamauga, 

Rock Spring, and Lafayette like an ulcer 

to invite flow in and out, juiced 

the residents in taxes to make up 

a few lanes of deficit, and found instead 

a string of withered Georgia towns 

dangling like drought peaches 

from an asphalt stem. Still,

every first Thursday a handful 

of residents gather to say what matters

to them, staking their hopes 

and grievances like plot lines

in the plat map clarifying all

that's not their lives. Faced now

with the question of how both to be and go 

somewhere, Jerry Pope points 

during public comment to the example 

of the old Rayford Road he takes home

they want to pave or shut down, due to

its low visibility: “Just can’t go fast.

Dirt road. Everyone knows it’s a dirt road.”