Two Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Tau Tau

Think of the unsprouted bean, no larger than a knuckle,

ripped from dry bed, the fractious lands of antipathy;

remember the Tau tau of South Sulawesi, effigies of the Toraja 

pitched high on hillside in reverent likeness,

this is how the arrow remembers the sky, so conspicuously sated;

how diver comes to mother pearl, hands clasped in caring,

follicle-plucked from root like the dreams of absent kite makers –

this is what I want for you, more than anything else:

why I live and breathe and forge great kisses 

upon your head.

The Canaanites Run for Cover

Sky bled into sky, and the Canaanites run for cover:

divining the bomb, almost; that great absentia that comes

with trivial goals: Asherah's bronze womb, productive

man and woman in toil, fleet fondness of El the merciful!

And the scampers felt forsook as the returning dark.

Mountain behind mountain into rock. 

Doom on the breath, the alacritous retreat:

cowed cries for a vengeful Ba'al.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Red Fez, World Inkers Network, Evergreen Review, Harbinger Asylum, Rusty Truck, Himalaya Diary, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The Oklahoma Review.  He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.