The Small Birds of Sound

State of Alabama v. Robert E. Chambliss, 1977 When they come filling the yard with their overheard, broke-glass catastrophes of voice, overcrowded party line, he lets the screen door clap to see them plume the settle back to the fence, aftershocks of crowd and wail. When they come he says again he was home at breakfast radio preacher doing love thy neighbor and then the bomb, just ask the wife. The silence in the TV's cathode glow slowly fills with questions as starlings shutter light then weigh the lines, voices tangled in their claws. • They had him buying dynamite, a case he says he passed along, then the other's car behind the church, four men dome-lit in early dark. Now all they have is years of brag and noise and alibi, a quiet in which the trail's confused. At times it seemed he wasn't real, that he was no one, a story everyone had heard, just not the end, that he was different men, one arm with a bomb, another making calls miles outside of town, a fog, an exhalation, scattering when seen.