I Pay Extra to Doordash Taco Bell

Because the nearest is a mile away, yet, everything is.  / The trashcan, the door, the fan. I’m sweating in a room  // full of yesterday’s napkins & my dog can’t come inside / to lay next to me. She’s guarding the far-off; a bit of her fur pokes // through the bottom of my bedroom door. She smells a phone / on do-not-disturb with Doordash open. This Crunchwrap &  // Baja Blast will save me, I think. I think about the time my  / father & I were in his Honda Element sweating, surrounded  // by trash, given up on a tent in the hundred-degree Georgia night-sun.  / I finish dad’s water bottle. Spigot’s close, maybe a mile away, he said. // Imagine yourself getting up & opening the door advice / from therapy. I imagine the door swinging open to a land of  // Crunchwrap Supremes & Baja Blast fountains with winning lottery ticket towels. / I have a dog untouched by my cumbersome, she’s got dinosaur bones to attend to,  // not time to protect my rotting room. My father’s swimming in the fountain &  / I join him. He teaches me how to cannonball, my mother gets it on the camcorder, // we’re laughing & I do not think about the distance to the Taco Bell branded / dive board. We’ll watch back the tape & say where did all the time go? Here,  // the doordasher was six minutes away an hour ago. Contacting support is  / something I'm not great at. They can issue a refund or I can wait an hour  // for a reorder. An hour is the mile of time. I’ll walk my dog, / take out trash, call my parents, & the food will arrive; I see it all clearly

C. Heyne (any/all) is a genderqueer writer from Sunrise, Florida, and resides in Hoboken, NJ. C is the recipient of the William Morgan Poetry Award and has work featured in Sundog Lit, DreamPOP, Identity Theory, and Boats Against The Current, amongst others. Their chapbook “my room (and other wombs)” is forthcoming (Bullshit Lit, 2023).

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