“lives we deserve”

“Taco Bell Booty”

by Ghia Maxwell

All of the sauces at Taco Bell combined

don’t compare to how saucy I am.

I am the forbidden volcano sauce

that deserves my rightful menu place.

I am a Double Chalupa amongst hard shells,

a Cheesy Gordita Crunch in a sea of fresco orders.

I’ve got the biggest beef in Taco Bell history.

My booty is bigger than Baja Blast.

My thighs are thicker than Double Steak Grilled Cheese Burritos.

My belly is softer and fuller than all the fresh Quesaritos combined.

My lips simmer the scorch of Diablo Sauce.

My fat body was born ready for Taco Bell.

You don’t need a refined palette to know I’m delicious.

Let’s face it:

I’m the Nacho Bell Grande of love

packing my spice into every bite.

I’m not just a snack. I’m a whole Taco Bell feast.

*smacks my own butt*

I’m all that and a side of Cheesy Fiesta Potatoes.

If you don’t understand that,

you’re not getting a crumb of me.

You don’t deserve it.

If you do understand that,

I might let you taste

the Taco Supreme between my sour cream thighs

and feel the glory of my Taco Bell booty.

“Diet Book”

Riley Wignall

At the start of 2022 I was in a creative rut, and I wanted to try blackout poetry to get the juices flowing again. It wasn’t my first thought to create poems about fatness and dieting, but like many fat people, my life and experiences kind of orbit around these subjects whether I want them to or not.

Still, diet books were an obvious choice because, at the time, it was the peak of “New Year’s resolution fever.” Not only that, but I spent my childhood pouring over every low fat cookbook and diet magazine I could find. I thought maybe there’d be some kind of relief in “maiming and reclaiming.”

Creating this poem (and others like it) shocked me, because it showed me just how far I’ve walked away from dieting, and, at the exact same time, how enticing its promises can be. I took breaks from working at times because I could feel the call to diet slowly creeping back in. Even with everything I know about the racist history of fatphobia, the research, and my principles, I’d still find myself considering it -- so insidious!

The testimonials and “success” stories in one of the books I was working with kept me focused. As a kid I would’ve scoured them looking for hope; reading them as an adult sucker-punched me right in the heart. In one, someone excitedly said they’d recruited their 80-year-old mother to join them on the diet. Another person talked about how they had met their goal, but deeply missed rice, emphasizing that it was a food central to their culture. I felt sympathetic, and pained, and angry for them. Mostly, I felt kinship with them. With their pages, I tried to bring out truths and express what I think are shared experiences for people in larger bodies.

I’m still making poems with the books I bought, because working with this text reminds me of something I could never had understood as a child: diet culture really does keep us from the lives we deserve.