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Post by MoonyLuna on Jan 3, 2009 7:53:25 GMT -5
October 8, 1789: Rachel Wall Boston, Massachusetts The woodcut illustrating Life, Last Words and Dying CONFESSION, of RACHEL WALL: a child's dark awkward house, a ladder slanting toward three figures, hanging above the crowd that piled onto cobbles to watch three robbers hang, and one a woman. The picture's clumsy. Still, her petticoats, small bodice are portrayed in detail. She said she never robbed that girl, but did admit that she deserved to die: the gold she stole from under the captain's head, asleep at Long-Wharf. Sabbath-breaking. The lie that got another woman whipped in her stead:
I declare the crippled Dorothy Horn innocent of the theft at Mr. Vaughn's.
October 29, 1901: Leon Czolgosz Auburn, New York A thousand people saw him at the front of the hall, lined up to shake McKinley's hand. Some helped the secret service hold him, punch his stomach so he couldn't fire again. The jury needed less than half an hour. He said he wasn't sorry: He was shouting prosperity when there was none for the poor. I've done my duty. I don't believe in voting. He got the chair, and went to prison to wait. Crowds gathered when they brought him, mauled him so he bled, frothed at the mouth, passed out. The state gave him one thousand seven hundred volts two times. He lurched, gave off some steam. And when they felt no pulse, they flipped the switch again.
Copyright Jill McDonough
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Post by MoonyLuna on Jan 3, 2009 7:54:16 GMT -5
Featured Poet Jill McDonough
Jill McDonough has taught incarcerated college students through Boston University's Prison Education Program since 1999. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and Slate. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, she is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
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