Danger is as danger and I once did—
working in a Taco Bell’s warm-breath cloud
of spiced beef and tube cheese—
boob-flash a stunned mother
waiting at the drive-thru window,
mouth wide as a hungry suckling’s.
Soon I saw all the PTA ma’ams
clutching their jumbo pearls, as if
I’d filch them from their chests.
My gall and glands were nothing
but appetizers for them. What whet lips
can spread: food, blood, spit, sweat.
Plus lube and pubes, uppers and cankers,
Fire Sauce even. Fastest are hisses and digs:
Who knows what drugs she’s on, how many
men. So no need for DNA revenge—
hot trash that I am, my name passed tit to lip
through every throat in town by week’s end.
Rochelle Hurt is a queer writer living in Florida, but she was raised in Youngstown, Ohio on a steady diet of Taco Bell and orange pop. She is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and runs the review site The Bind.
Taco Bell Quarterly 