Three New Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Coat Check Ticket Returned

This is hardly the Odysseus of Homer,

blind as Polyphemus and telling tales around the fire

this is dinner and a show, 

a coat check ticket returned

that closet of skins to search through,

a numbering system like the one used at Alexandria

before the fires

you could do far worse for a first job,

let me tell you

the coat check tickets almost 

return on their own

everyone determined to leave as they came,

to be made whole

to make the journey home 

with all the best of themselves.

Feast Bowl

Of course there is ceremony, almost ritual 

in the expecting out-stretched hands for the feast bowl;

it is not the loner's lack of understanding, but rather a fiercest

refusal to become peopled, coupling in shared experience

like a bag of marbles, how insufferable

such connections can seem to the puttering ascetic,

and it is not really self-denial at all, but instead a preservation

of Self to remain calmly unchecked, standing over dirty shave water,

tapping razor against sink basin, removing what has become

unmanageable until there is nothing left;

even the names are forgotten, those faces that can't be placed:

that milk-mother once sat over you in shared nourishment.

That parks are there for everyone, even the statues.

Landmark

The landmark could be seen from the road.

More of a communal signifier, than object in its own right.

It belonged to all, silent in statuary.

Like the senility of old women, old men.

Positioned in chairs, smiling serenely out of time.  

With teeth no longer their own.

Being ever-present among the garrulous tribe,

jowling in monument; unmindful youth spilling down

the generations, forestallable in all moments, but one.

And what blame is really to be found in bloom?

Neither child nor landmark ever knows.

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.