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. Support local book­sellers and inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers by order­ing a print copy of the mag­a­zine.

Photo by José Martín Ramírez