Two poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Wish List

Buttressed by amateur morning and professional building,

teetering elevators form a wish list of cabled pulley and glide,

the slow of the automatic door, so un-sculpted bodies

pass through at impatient angles, turning like spoiled food

in a lunchroom crisper; regional headquarters on a group call

of shared voice and company custom,

and the meter maid like taxman on foot levies charge;

unhappy in her life, so that others must be as well:

trading post mosquito net, 

grocery store floaters between till and juncture.

The fall of infallible grace.

We are no more scuttled then at sea;

stay with the land-dwellers among us:

the glass scrapers, the well-mapled trees.

Winter Poem

It is good to be gracelessly housed, shut away inside the true womb 

of things; I would be a fool to succumb to the many growths,

jumping into that sea of scorpions, the frozen trough 

and guideless blisters across the hand.  Mountains split

like hardwood under axe.  Strung amusements 

once rowdily tread for kings, now

faint prints of visiting night things, no longer on the sight-see.

How fine then to lose the wonder; if not quite correct,

than consider this more a moment of weakness than

anything else.  But what I consider has lessened.

These furry brows, this near-chatteled perforce.

Frank rhotacisms of the brrr.

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, Evergreen Review, Harbinger Asylum, Rusty Truck, Himalaya Diary, and The Oklahoma Review.  He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.