The last fretful hour mending poems.

It is my job to see a blade of grass, a blade of blood working beneath 

the Warhol Museum. The Warho­las, after all, would have been among that newly 

minted hard­scrab­ble class of Euro­pean immi­grants in Pitts­burgh. There is white, 

and then there is white. It should go, I was running down the street, dark soot 

cling­ing to my body amid a race riot. A police officer mistook me for black. I was 

Czech. I am Czech, I screamed, with factory flowers, flat­tened pink peonies bobbing off

the hem of her dress. Moranda, at the R.J. Reynolds plant, in the base­ment, that wave of 

heat roped lac­er­a­tion on your fin­ger­tips, stood as a con­stant reminder. As a stemmer,

as if you had worn Judy Garland’s iconic blue gingham dress, deliv­ered sorghum syrup

to a Grand Wizard, the employ­ee demands of Local 22. Working people filed up

and over a hill in lines rem­i­nis­cent of lone party stream­ers. Eye-level sur­vey­ors peered 

up to retract disdain, for how cor­po­rate profits fur­thered infla­tion. The clouds momentarily 

flat­lined so that rain and kings atoned. It should go, you had had no warm examples. 

The ter­res­tri­al walk you took down­town amid threats from the KKK in Florida 

wasn’t what made you Amer­i­can. Some­where dif­fused in the soil, tongue untied

was the moral sense, the tired          of being sick and tired. As if the world beneath 

an immac­u­late bubble burst. Both ward and flame, that kingdom of life in between

the colored museum, meant I could pass for white. Passing was the blunted eye of 

a needle, the magic stone, like a med­i­cine pouch without its con­tents, dumb doll.

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.