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, Himalaya Diary, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
Outside the Coliseum
Outside the Coliseum, a couple fight.
Where pigeons gather, and the senate conspires.
The great villas are sweeping tongues of the land.
As if deed become dictate in these halls of blood currency.
The role of the twisted fates.
Surely, you have once cursed the many treacheries.
I would doubt you if you hadn’t.
As both person and promise.
Though it is unkind to say, such things must be said.
That fighting couple got to things early.
They must visit the sweaty mystics.
Or know someone that does.
Immersive
1.
We were to meet the great Dutchman
in haste and hunger:
two generations, plus one in number.
Downtown, tickets in hand.
Unsure of our health, our wonder.
2.
This, the light wet I have come to know –
the concrete square
staggered by potted gardens.
An undetected wind
at my back.
The darkened city
was dancing
in rain.
Right is the Way of Thieves
If I stole your charms from a Parisian summer,
would you blush the scoundrel’s love, sit at graves
of stony bagmen with an aging prizefighter’s poise?
All joy is through the hands, no wonder the palm reader
keeps returning, so assured that right is the way of thieves
on these nights the stray yowls carry – have you seen the Lautrecs
down in the basement of the Musee de l’Orangerie?
Beside the public bathrooms, what a perfect place
for our marvellous tippled teapot thuggee!
Lambs to an ocular fleecing, I tell you.
Can you sing such raptures again?
As purloins the spinning record of unsettled accounts…
And your recent widowhood being the talk of the
stinking docklands, one could hardly be blamed
for mistaking this scratch of incipient desires with the many
loaded vessels of passing scurvy:
a larceny of the years.
‘so singly we dream of shadows’
You cannot ask for too much,
surely you must know this like the earth
meets the sea. I am certain of blood currency,
burrowing tundra-mole without eyes to see,
all manner of lurch things that find the ear,
retreat into sleeping crevice.
What has gone is pug to pillory,
deny it if you must.
That greatest heaviness of eye,
so singly we dream of shadows:
your Baphomet breath and silly Darth Vader arms.
Lost to a plodding shoegazer’s hum.
Hunting Gingerbread Men
The roof of the building was sugar daddy calling.
Kellogg positioned himself with a clear line of sight.
Looked down into the scope like devouring the known world.
Checking to see that the wind was negligible.
And it didn’t take long for the gingerbread men to arrive.
Kellogg fired and a hip exploded.
Then he blew the head off another.
Icing flung everywhere like striking cobras.
Another took one to the leg.
Three others in the gut of the stomach.
Kellogg had never heard these sound before.
The gingerbread screams.
Tomahawks falling to the earth
and soaring raptors with those hunting talons.
Kellogg reloaded,
come upon by this flush run of adrenaline
he had not felt since leaving the womb.
The sirens in the distance were gingerbread sirens.
Nothing but shipwrecks from the Port Authority.
