Mustard Food Trays

Let's workshop this bitch!

Mustard Food Trays

In the steel cafeteria still chewing 
the shock of being here (although 
he did long intuit, since first grade 
perhaps, where his rage would lead
him), eating among Bic-bald whites
he spots a cackling man who must be, 
yes, his little cousin, decades unseen:
the one whose toddler mouth of rot
he would night guard from roaches;
the one who tried to fuck Grandma;

the one, so rumor had reached him
long after collegeing out the hood,
who ran over his “fiancé” before
reversing over her crawl to woods;
the one who, having lit up as well
in their eye contact, approaches
to embrace him into an alliance 
that, as a professor and a father
of black children, will pulverize 
what little remains of his identity.

*This poem first appeared in Cholla Needles (2022). (Shout out to Richard Soos! I will get out to Joshua Tree one of these days.)