This Taco Bell is Sinking into the Boiling Sea

It’s been floating for days but it’s taking on water / I live in a smooth plastic booth that bobs and / I’ve forgotten how air conditioning feels / I miss it more than I miss my mother // A dolphin swims between the deep fryers / a tentacle toys with the diet pepsi dispenser / a hermit crab clatters around in a napkin holder / oyster pearls rattle the linoleum / barnacles grow curling like cinnamon twists on the help wanted sign / “let’s taco bout a job” / I swallow a soggy chalupa and / watch the wave tips simmer // It’s important to me that the fish know that I’m a bisexual anticapitalist / that I recycled and voted / that this isn’t my fault / how do I explain that to them how do I explain how / we lived más a little too close to the sun and now we live inside one of her spots how / we baja blasted the earth open and now we live inside her core // So hot brain melt nacho cheese melt // I just want the fish to know // this isn’t my fault

Sunny Rosen is an MFA candidate in fiction at LSU, a copywriter and publicity coordinator for LSU Press and The Southern Review, and fiction editor for New Delta Review. Originally from Newark, Delaware, she currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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