Moons Over My Hammy
BY JON SANDS
is a sandwich I know dick about. I’m not above Denny’s
3:00 AM breakfast. I’m just from Cincinnati, which means
if you’re classically inebriated with the moon out, that
is some shit you do at Waffle House, where the hash brown
options describe my sixteen-year-old brain cells tonight
at Mark Baker’s dad’s townhouse (who is gone on business),
and we play Kings until seven people have chugged
the equivalent of four Natural Lights, each, from a flower vase,
and my parents told me, Just no alcohol and that’s final,
which is high school speak for cover-your-tracks, which is
fucking impossible for a sixteen year old. I wear American
Eagle everything, because it’s an affordable Abercrombie,
in order to look like someone who has made out with more
than three girls (two of which while I was on vacation). Tonight,
Alicia Westen spends an hour over my lap at Mark’s dad’s
vomiting into a plastic garbage bag I am holding, each time
passing echoey loud gas, which will define her more in our minds
than that her father will die unexpectedly from a heart attack
in seventeen months. Carrie Ballard will laugh the loudest,
even though in two years, she will fellate three juniors
in one night, and we will write it into the senior skit for our
graduating class of 630, and Coach Ambrose will find me
the morning of the assembly, and say man-to-man, to follow
through with that skit is the kind of thing that damages someone
for life, so I smile while backing away and say It is out of my
control. Tonight Ox and I throw two punches that both miss,
then lock ourselves in Mark’s dad’s bedroom to cry and say
we love each other, while Mark screams and pounds the door,
and people will tell that story eleven years from now.
Tonight, Jay Oliver is a sixteen-year-old on mushrooms
who doesn’t need to deal drugs, wearing Ox’s XXXL
highlighter orange jump-suit, being chased through
Tannenger Woods by a suburban traffic cop who shatters
his femur on an oak tree. And we definitely meet
at Waffle House at three in the morning where we know
Joanne the waitress by name, pool our quarters to play
Meatloaf’s “I Would do Anything for Love” 36 times
back to back on the juke box, and I fall out of my chair
on purpose to laugh on the ground. I have not lost my virginity,
my grandparents, or spoken a word aloud about my father
falling in love with another woman. Mark Baker uses the word
“gay” seventeen times, refusing to apologize. It is 4:00 A.M
in 1999 at Waffle House. I am drunk enough to loudly
call him racist. I throw up in the bathroom before taking my
scattered, smothered, covered hash browns to go, stumble
the full five miles of moonlight back to my bedroom,
weeping the entire way.
is a sandwich I know dick about. I’m not above Denny’s
3:00 AM breakfast. I’m just from Cincinnati, which means
if you’re classically inebriated with the moon out, that
is some shit you do at Waffle House, where the hash brown
options describe my sixteen-year-old brain cells tonight
at Mark Baker’s dad’s townhouse (who is gone on business),
and we play Kings until seven people have chugged
the equivalent of four Natural Lights, each, from a flower vase,
and my parents told me, Just no alcohol and that’s final,
which is high school speak for cover-your-tracks, which is
fucking impossible for a sixteen year old. I wear American
Eagle everything, because it’s an affordable Abercrombie,
in order to look like someone who has made out with more
than three girls (two of which while I was on vacation). Tonight,
Alicia Westen spends an hour over my lap at Mark’s dad’s
vomiting into a plastic garbage bag I am holding, each time
passing echoey loud gas, which will define her more in our minds
than that her father will die unexpectedly from a heart attack
in seventeen months. Carrie Ballard will laugh the loudest,
even though in two years, she will fellate three juniors
in one night, and we will write it into the senior skit for our
graduating class of 630, and Coach Ambrose will find me
the morning of the assembly, and say man-to-man, to follow
through with that skit is the kind of thing that damages someone
for life, so I smile while backing away and say It is out of my
control. Tonight Ox and I throw two punches that both miss,
then lock ourselves in Mark’s dad’s bedroom to cry and say
we love each other, while Mark screams and pounds the door,
and people will tell that story eleven years from now.
Tonight, Jay Oliver is a sixteen-year-old on mushrooms
who doesn’t need to deal drugs, wearing Ox’s XXXL
highlighter orange jump-suit, being chased through
Tannenger Woods by a suburban traffic cop who shatters
his femur on an oak tree. And we definitely meet
at Waffle House at three in the morning where we know
Joanne the waitress by name, pool our quarters to play
Meatloaf’s “I Would do Anything for Love” 36 times
back to back on the juke box, and I fall out of my chair
on purpose to laugh on the ground. I have not lost my virginity,
my grandparents, or spoken a word aloud about my father
falling in love with another woman. Mark Baker uses the word
“gay” seventeen times, refusing to apologize. It is 4:00 A.M
in 1999 at Waffle House. I am drunk enough to loudly
call him racist. I throw up in the bathroom before taking my
scattered, smothered, covered hash browns to go, stumble
the full five miles of moonlight back to my bedroom,
weeping the entire way.
Jon Sands is a Brooklyn based Author known for electrifying readings. His first full collection of poems, The New Clean, was released in 2011 from Write Bloody Publishing. He directs weekly writing workshops at the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange center in Midtown Manhattan), and is a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. He starred in the 2011 web-series “Verse: A Murder Mystery” from Rattapallax Films. His work has appeared in The Millions, Word Riot, Kill Author, decomP Magazine, Union Station, Muzzle, and others. He tours extensively, nationally and internationally, but lives in Brooklyn. Say yes to www.jonsands.com.