A criminal is thrown from a high cliff into the sea. He has been covered in feathers, live birds attached to him to slow his fall. Fishermen wait below, hopeful of being able to carry him safely away. The people are punishing the criminal with death, yet simultaneously rooting for his survival. This startling image from Strabo, with its delicious ironic tension, is the center‐piece of “Civic Poetics.” The thesis consists of a cycle of poems imagining life in a city where this bizarre ritual is performed, coupled with a number of essays written for several Religious Studies courses on related themes. The interplay of poetry and essay aims to illuminate the experience of my own journey from criminal outsider to re‐integrated citizen. The lenses of (1) my own experiences in 21st century Atlanta and (2) poetic imaginative reconstruction of this ancient ritual reveal a startling picture: a criminal’s relations with the divine, as mediated by his state, and a state’s relations with the divine as mediated by its criminals.