chapter 3
poem
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
of respite when they’d straighten themselves to pillars
and drop dollars on counters and act like Daylights a suite
at the Ritz and the devastating beauty queens with their gaulin
fragile attention gave them forever to live in a tickle, the whetted
canepiece, this one day, forgotten in a whore’s laugh.
Suddenly these men filled Hampton Court square
demanding the foreman’s head.
They were thirsty for blood and for rum.
Fitzy stayed hidden in his shop behind the shutters.
He heard one man say it was not the foreman’s head they should get,
that would not be wise.
The man continued: it must be fire for fire;
the factory must be burnt down.
But the men murmured. They were afraid.
Someone made a joke, they roared,
and soon they were saying fire can’t buy rum,
they were roaring money, then rum, pounding Fitzy’s shutter,
shouting his name for him to set them on fire.
They grew hoarse against the shutters.
The sun had taken all motion out of their voices.
Fitzy could hear them through the zinc,
like dogs about to die, cried out children, that dry rustle
you hear after the crop is torched and the wind bristles the ashes.
No men were out there. Only a shirring noise.
That was when Fitzy opened the shutters.
Their red eyes in charcoal suits looked up at him,
and with an overseer’s scorn, he nodded them in.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His first collection,
Far District: Poems, won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is an assistant
professor of English at Cornell University.