‘I Want to Walk to McDonald’s Forever, Friend’
— Hannah Cohen
send me a Rite-Aid valentine that says be my bitch
& I’ll be yours.
I love any and all poems that feature burgers, and Rochelle Hurt’s new poem in Four Way Review satisfies my hunger and yet leaves me unfilled. It’s a poem about the comfort of “Big Macs & a thousand half-hug pats” and yet there’s no definite end. There’s a pained humor in how the speaker aches “to wooze in [their] menthol-cherry/aura”—a phrase sickly saccharine without tipping the poem over into rose-colored territory. I appreciate how the structure of the poem mimics its very action of “walk[ing] back & back & back” with the indented lines and spacing of every end word. I want to rewind and pause every moment in this poem, want to be the one walking home “as one/another”.