Public Record

Public Record

The county council is not unlike

the telephone company: service 

is spotty, but it’s all you get 

around here. 15 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, drowned 

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 what isn't 

our lives. Faced now with the question 

of how both to be and go 

somewhere, Jim Pope points 

during public comment to the example 

of the old Concord Road they want

to shut down due to the invisibility

of what's ahead. “Can’t go fast. Dirt road. 

Everyone knows it’s a dirt road.”