Selected Poems of Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Half a World Away, Away

I wish
I was standing on that shoreline
just after dark.

Watching all those beautiful lighted lamps
sail out into the wading forget-me-not Ganges.

An ancient sand grounded between my toes.
The smell of burning incense
everywhere.

‘Something to water, to grow’

It is the inside living that can be most stultifying,
this barren womb of walls and chipped plaster
and someone gave me this plant to liven up the place,
something to water, to grow; I think they felt that I was
without child and between pet and needed something
to care for that was not my hair, that I may just be
banging around that place and succumb to my own thoughts
so now I have this green leafy offering, having set the planter
in the window by the bed, that the groggy and benumbed
may leave me; how quarrelsome a box of matches,
how nimble the dimpling music of this rectionless
frenzy of feet.

‘Your Kisses, Wandering Hills That Never Once Come Back To Me’

Freedom for one is distance from others;
your kisses, wandering hills that never once come back to me
and to wait by the window is to feel each pane of glass,
to run oily fingers over a grand smudge of disbeliefs –
it is erratic of me to find such falterings with ease,
my Tintern Abbey is a bombed out hovel looking for Faust
in the funnies, this poacher’s Blakeian Tyger…
Send in the trebuchet! I refuse to launch further accusation;
if there is fault to be found, it can be mine
so these arms close off across foolish chest
as morning dew leaves the grasses for unknown devils.

‘What of the lotus flower’

What of the lotus flower demands grand consternation,
nightly havocs, forcibly unseen from moat to millwright?
I wouldn’t blow you my bubbles of the perennially aquatic,
flush with everything but money, you see!
A bachelor to remain so for reasons that may not be jarred,
stored away under a single bare bulb; so much can be said
by that stark loonie dangle, wood panelling and winsome oar
of younger, fitter self:
Is someone at the door?
The pageantry on my neck has begun to stand up.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Kavya Kishor Magazine, GloMag, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.