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.
The Front Desk Girl was a Parade of Locusts
Sitting around
in my room on the rent
wondering who the first sorry bastard
to ever vomit was.
Surely,
he thought he must have been dying.
I used to think like that as well.
Now, I follow the pleats of dirty curtains
back down to tacky floor.
In a black boon swivel desk chair
that keeps the world turning.
The Do Not Disturb hung over the door handle
as though I am taking very important meetings.
A true man on the go.
Rolling out over questionable beds
like a human cement mixer.
Some headcase out at the bus stop
screaming down the invisible
man.
The Moment Janet Leigh Decides She Prefers Baths
Playing jump rope in the dark,
skipping to all the good parts
the moment Janet Leigh decides
she prefers baths,
who could blame her?
Probably fingers down the chalkboard,
that dissolving sleep aid Puritan lust
& boy, did the Hitch get stabby with that one!
Always the voyeur like any good peep freak
director chewing the Van Gogh out of
consecutive bags of sunflower seeds
and the knock-less door is going
just as I planned;
sociability is a bag of dead leaves
set to common curb –
why do I get itchy in the dark?
the manumission of creaky stairwells.
A key to the city and a key to the heart:
I’m beginning to think the spooks
have an exact and direct impression
of everything that matters.
Interpretive Dance of the Dump Truck
triple glazed windows
and that ferret comes back from the hunt
as ceremonial fur
wires shooting out of walls
like steel town sparks
burning through repurposed work overalls
of the midnight oil
and the street below, a poor man’s theatre:
ashing wife beater bullfights
with the cans,
that spotty oafish slapdash
interpretive dance of the dump truck,
just enough Nureyev to forget
the smell –
old food wrappers pirouetting
out of its gluttonous
back gullet
so that I stand and clap –
demand an encore
that will not return for
another hungry
gatherings’
week.
How to Get Your Own Fatwa
I don’t know if I was born to lose,
but it happened soon after.
And I was proud, full of brimming refusals.
I wouldn’t go away.
Sailing around blind
on a ghost ship
of rusted snags.
Not accepting my station.
That a poverty of the soul should follow
a poverty of circumstance.
And this is why complete strangers try to tear you down.
How to get your own fatwa.
The Mothers Against Everything forever
amassing.
Bullyboy beatdowns on sight.
But I kept chugging along
in my own awkward way.
Losing the day, but never the light.
Finger Tourette’s
Please please me hands raised on Tony the Tiger
so some Chia Pet teacher can play
favourites in a foxhole;
I remember how nothing added up,
how the numbers left my head
like family court retainers trying
to keep the house
& my finger Tourette’s has been
flipping a dusty gunslinger’s hell
of late
sunken milk-bones of Jesse James;
tick-ridden, flaunting wool socks by that hissing
steam room radiator on the Tenderloin,
a rounded picture of some mystery woman
that seems to have kept all her beauty,
hugging the far wall so that you almost miss her
from the door;
sit up late with all the ghosts
that couldn’t haunt a hayride full
of adulterers
while the smokers at Timbuktu
bark the company brisket for 10,000 years
& my hair falls right out of my head
in ever-thinning handfuls
of failed surprise.