Essential Worker
There was only one black
employee at our school,
Danny the janitor
who cleaned up the crumbs from
our Little Debbie cakes
at lunch. Danny, who scrubbed
the toilets, the muscled
thirty-something guy who
became our protector,
who broke up playground fights
and chased down basketballs,
raised us up so we could
dunk on a ten-foot rim.
Danny, whose closet was
by the library where
he would tell us which shelves
hid the best books, let us
borrow his pen to sign
the check-out card. Danny
so-and-so, whose last name
we never bothered to
learn. Danny, probably
the one brown-skinned person
sprinkled into our white
iced ultra-processed lives.
Danny, I am thinking
of you now, still shining
those early hours, your smile
breaking beneath that dim
fluorescent light, a mop
hugged to your chest, about
to open up those big
double doors, let us in—
Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Poetry East, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others. His criticism has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, The College Language Association Journal, and elsewhere. His chapbook, November Weather Spell, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing in 2019. He teaches at Kutztown University.
