Stonecoast Review
The Literary Journal of the Stonecoast MFA
Dear Rosa Luxemburg
By Richard Hamilton
In his lithograph, The Martyrdom
Beckmann renders a boozy spectacle,
Batter in a basin, your body.
Can you picture man in dowdy dress?
Pocket protectors sullied by death.
Splayed like a punctured steam cake?
By now, your beloved cat Mimi
has turned over in her grave.
Cut of your body, angular lines.
Beyond Beckmann’s star-studded sky,
boughs of holly, loose cannonball—the IDF
hit home. Sclerotic knuckles, a prison
wall, and the unpopular view.
Had there been more at the margins?
Peopled, dazzlingly
blue with impatience,
fed up with unlawful detainments,
virtual touch, munitions. Death
is so presently unremarkable this Christmas,
despite the birth of our Arab prince, it
touches me and you. The morally ambivalent
coil of history about the mandrake vine
is not yet sleep befallen, is not yet sleep.
RICHARD HAMILTON (he/they) was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and raised in the American south. He is the author of Rest of US (Re-Center Press, 2021) and Discordant (Autumn House Press, 2023). Hamilton earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Alabama. He presently holds the 2023–2025 post-doctoral creative writing fellowship at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. They are a contributor in Issue 21 of the Stonecoast Literary Magazine.
This poem originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21.
Photo by José Martín Ramírez
