When in the Wendy’s Drive-Thru, They Ask Me What Sauce and I Say

by Taylor Byas

Batu Gezer

honey mustard and regret it because it was your favorite. Just last month or the month before, honey mustard tear- dropping into your beard as we ate on your leather couch, the sauce like a thick dusting of pollen over the bramble. And you, a first sign of spring. Then my thumb braving the sharper bristles to catch what begged for your white t-shirt. Your teeth caught my finger, nipped its pad before I could return it to my own tongue to taste you. Mine,

you said. All mine. A part of me disappearing into your mouth. And what about the other time, when honey barbeque clung to your chin’s steel wool until you covered my body with yours in my bed? You humming Kendrick Lamar into the bowl of my clavicle, how I was the swimming pool you wanted to dive in. You called it art afterwards —  your beard’s accidental stippling — sauce swirling across my upper breast, Van Gogh’s Starry Night

remixed. Your breath as smoky as a summer camp bonfire as you cleaned the plate of me, said you’ve never

tasted sweeter. Now I spill sauce onto myself in my apartment, shirtless. Honey mustard needles down my sternum-gap, and there is no one to reclaim these grasslands. No one to stop me before I dab away the mess, to say I got it

and let their dinner go cold.

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Taylor Byas is a first year Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. She completed her Masters in English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she was a part of the reading and editing staff for both Birmingham Poetry Review and NELLE. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, and others.