Dear Moranda Smith
By Richard Hamilton
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
flat lined 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.
This poem originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21.
Photo by Dominik Scythe