Broken Elbow. By Jonah Ort.
Cover Art by Madison Smith. Special Thanks to‌ Megabus Steve Roggenbuck Mountain Dew Donkey Coffee Facebook Jalapeno-Cheddar Combos Robert Frost And every friend, family member, and loved one. This book is for you, about you, but not about you at all.
Based on a true story.
“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em.” —Shel Silverstein, How Many, How Much
Drinking Cinnamon I'll drink a shot of cinnamon and vomit up my penance, spit out a Peso or two to pick me up a Peace Tea or at least a ticket home. And I hope you die a thousand deaths before you reach me on the telephone.
God’s Country My family and I are driving in a red Honda Odyssey. We stop in a gas station in Tennessee or Kentucky. As I get out of the van I saw John 3:16 tattooed on the chubby forearm of an overweight woman with a cigarette in her mouth. I see a cross dangling from the neck of the tired clerk inside. I see a bumper sticker saying “HELL IS REAL” on a rusty pickup truck. As my dad pumps gas he smirks: “This is God’s country.” When the meter clicks he puts the nozzle in the slot and we continue up the highway.
Nightwalking Waking up from a nap on a trampoline And it’s dark out. Shaking the spiders from your jacket And climbing down onto the woodchips. Rubbing your eyes of sleepiness And walking alone through your neighborhood. Slinking through suburbia without direction And finding tranquility in loneliness. (there’s nothing quite like the sound of scraping your feet on the sidewalk when no one can hear you, a shout in the night to an eager crowd of spiders and mice)
Important Cemeteries A society needs important cemeteries; pretty ones with lots of marble, exotic trees dug up from other places, a dead-tired worker mows the grass, greener than atrophy, and the concrete walking paths are smooth and crackless, further proof that the roads to Heaven are paved with taxpayer money.
Shifters in Neutral All my friends are dead and work at ice-cream shops, and every lover I’ve come across drives stickshift and outruns me, leaving a cloud of carbon monoxide I absorb through the filter of a cigarette. (Smoking won’t damage your psyche, some say it’s suicide but I think everyone’s a tad suicidal) All my friends are dead and work at ice cream shops and that keeps their shifters in neutral and their engines idle.
Sticks and Stones Someone told me silence is golden But I heard talk is cheap And if talk is cheap then silence is the price of an Arizona Green Tea, So that's why I use five-dollar words To buy you a gallon of gasoline Or a quarter of a bus ticket back from Tennessee. Because words will step on your toes And break your bones And feed you with Ginseng and Honey. That shit is lovely and well worth the money.
Sometimes I Feel Creepy Shudder and shiver in the month of October. Napping on trampolines deep in the summer. I lost my lovers early in the spring— cutters and killers, sometimes I feel creepy but mostly in the winter.
Eyeballs, Ears, Circadian Rhythm I’ve slept in the strangest of places and with the scariest of people; you’d be surprised how quickly it ruins your sleep-schedule. But we’re the same in that. And I don’t think I hear that well anymore, I’m deaf in one ear and you’re deaf in the other ear so when we’re together we’ll turn the subtitles off. And I don’t see that well anymore. But maybe you can be my eyes. (I read something stupid online that said “real eyes realize real lies”; I don’t know what a “real” eye looks like but I would like to buy a pair, and if they exist I’m sure you have them)
To The Corner (At some point in our lives, we’ve been called babies, but we’re all babies, really. We’re born children and we die children.) We’re toddlers stuck in a circus, bewildered and dazzled and eager to walk the trapeze. In the first ring is a group of women, half of them are goddesses and the other half are actresses and they all look identical and they all kneel down and call you “darling”. Across the way are your parents, except they’re children too and each are on opposite sides of a fat red line in the sand and they stand behind big men in suits clutching the tails of their slate-grey jackets, peeking out from behind the men at one another, timid and terrified and angry.
Your friends are in the third ring, at a party, they’re dancing and drinking and carrying on while you stand dead-center, sober as a deer in headlights when the police rush in; “Who let the goddamn child have alcohol?” Everyone points at one another as you waddle to the corner, and with these things it’s always to the corner, really.
Dredge My mom lives next to a lake that is dying. An ocean of sediment is washing away the waves, driving the fish ashore and the geese southward. It needs dredged, she says. Everyone in the neighborhood is petitioning, donating money and writing letters for the government to bring a giant mechanical rake to rake the muck away. My mom gave $50 to the cause; But I’ll pay 100 times that to dredge my soul; I’ll take a plastic rake you use to make sand castles and rake away the muck to make a happy home for love and life and maybe fish and geese as well.
Warheads I used to wash off the sour powder from Warheads and I have felt death twice in my life and once was when I accidentally ate a yellow one and the other was waking up from a bad dream with cold sweat and an aching tongue. It was warmer than the running water over a handful of edible firecrackers, more curious than an open wound, and sour like love is sour. I got a kiss from Mr. Sick and spit the candies in the sink.
Glass Bones and Paper Skin The backs of our fathers are crooked at acute angles. Ours are neatly hunched over, desk-weary, teetering on the border of broken and fully-functional but never quite crossing it. It’s now apparent that our glass bones and paper skin bend like metal spoons to psychics and burn up when our laptops overheat. Carpal tunnel will be the death of us. Arthritis will be our downfall, revealing the chinks in the armor, and that we are walking, talking skeletons blending in with other skeletons trying desperately not to scare anyone. But we are resilient. Our glass bones and paper skin notwithstanding, our essence is made of rubber, it bounces and bends and snaps back to place and even if we hit a nail we’ll re-inflate.
Nantahala I curled up like the legs of a spider when it dies in a tent meant for two but only housing one under a beach towel and on top of two life jackets (I forgot my sleeping bag but I wouldn’t sleep anyway) I closed my eyes and saw nothing then I opened them and saw the sun. I unzipped the entrance one link at a time so I didn’t wake you or the boy you slept with (like a robber to a pitbull) and I sat by the river and shivered. When the Sun rose it said something. I’m not sure what exactly but I think it was something beautiful.
Like Tin Cans My bones snap like tin cans kicked off of Where The Sidewalk Ends, where they land and bounce and bend, cutting bare feet and sticking to tires, making noise and ruining family vacations. My bones are like stitches and scars and broken elbows. My bones are the fingers in your hair and the holes in your shoes and the twigs that snap beneath them.
Chi-Hands One time I forgot how to spell “darling”. I thought I was better than that but it’s whatever, and I can’t wait until this kind of weather reminds me of you and I can’t wait until I can relate being sleepy with being in love and I can’t wait for the drumroll nor the snare hit, nor the denouement. And I’ll make tea from all your bit lips, exhales, closed eyes and hair twirls, crushed up in a stone bowl, poured into a ceramic mug, and drank on a night like this.
It Shouldn’t Be Cold In Georgia It shouldn’t be cold in Georgia; my shoes scuff the freezing concrete, I listen closely and hear the sidewalk whimper and tremble under the weather. A cold snap, the weatherman called it, because snapping is exactly what it’ll do if you’re not careful. I look back to the mountain that stands at the edge of town (not resting but standing, a guard at constant attention). It has a winter coat of evergreen trees and it does not shiver like I do. It looks down on my mortality and scoffs; “Little human, so troubled by the cold, I will outlive you.” I pull my collar up and keep walking and dare not look back again.
Fourth Gear I’m asleep in your car and I still don’t get used to my dreams pressed up against the soothing sound of a broken AC whirring like a sickly animal while the front left wheel is low on air, purring like a kitten, and you’re in fourth gear and I wake up to you crying and I still don’t get used to your crying. I freeze like a criminal with a sprained ankle— and crack like the pavement in Ohio— and I die only little deaths anymore.
Sonic Run It’s all dark in the Honda Accord but the glowing dials light up my friend’s face like an angel while another friend, in the backseat, pats my shoulder, speaking volumes without saying a word and my heart is broken as we drive down darkish roads while the lights of oncoming cars shine like ghosts passing through empty hallways, minding their own business. Although we lost our appetites minutes ago we figured we should eat, so I scrambled up my quarters and dimes as we pulled into Sonic and the waitress that served us was alert and smiling and the burger she arrived with tasted like gold, the half-price vanilla shake like silver, and a boat of tater-tots fried to an even bronze; it was the best meal I had ever eaten.
I think everything’s a little easier with a full stomach, and it takes being hungry to appreciate your food, and when you know what sadness tastes like, happiness becomes a little more gourmet. The car ride home was quiet except for the music faintly playing from the radio, and the dashboard glowed and the engine hummed and the streetlights blurred ad infinitum along the darkish roads of my future, lonely but not alone, sad but not depressed, ever-hopeful and ever-wonderful.
A Nice and Pretty View I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation get some really shitty tattoos; Asking for spare change, smoking and cursing in alleyways and coffee shops, behind Macbooks and earbud headphones, bullshitting about anarchy and communism and revolution. I don’t care about any of that; all I know is I can hike to a hill with a nice and pretty view and no one can stop me. And from there I see no governments nor greed but only trees.
And Thanks For The Pencil I wrote this poem with a pencil I found on the ground. I wonder what it wrote before; I hope it was something lovely like a short story or a shitty haiku. Or maybe it was a love letter, or something hateful, but as long as it had passion or meaning I’m sure it was at least a little beautiful for only being written.
Granite The mountain in my neighborhood screams for Justice like an angry, mute judge. It is paved up to its summit while rows of houses snake up its sides, (spines on the back of an android dinosaur), while the milky yellow lights of windows dot the horizon at sunset, keeping the giant awake until a designated bedtime. The Trail of Tears once ran along its base and I think if the mountain could cry it would have; yet my hand is not big enough to pat its back and my voice will never be as silent nor powerful as its.
Down The Elevator Sometimes I can hear the devil, she lives down on the bottom level of the building that I live in when you take the elevator down it’s the last room on the left and I can hear her cry through my floor; it makes me nervous though I’ll admit I feel bad for her. My Sunday School teacher said that Jesus, filled with pious rage, once flipped a table: I wonder if he ever loved the devil.
All The Credit I’m at my friend’s college in the parking lot smoking cigarettes and he says “if I fuck up any time in my life it’ll be right now, my freshman year” I looked down and took a drag and shivered for a second but looked forward, and I was scared but happy too because if I fuck up it’ll be all my fault. And if I don’t, I’ll take all the credit.
God of Pollution You and I will climb to the very top of your apartment building, we will stand on our tippy-toes and peek our heads over the smog and see either space or heaven, either will do. I will raise my fists like two radio towers, unshakable and manmade, (because, motherfucker, I am manmade and womanmade as well). You will look in awe at me, standing like a puny god, arrogant and beautiful and dumb (though you are a puny god yourself but you just don’t know it yet) And I will scream:
“I AM SKINNY LEGS AND UPSET STOMACH, GOD OF POLLUTION AND TIPPY-TOES. I CAN POWER THE CITY OF ANGELS AND I AM UNPHASED, AND I AM WONDERFUL.” I will lower down from my toes and out of the smog, descending from the heavens from a holy scissor-lift and greet you, renewed from the pollution, baptized.
END.