Six Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

 

Gleefully the Butcher Cleaves, He Cleaves  

 

Head severed from working whole, 

the entrails removed and the prime cuts 

set aside for market. 

                    

Weighed and packaged and priced  

for wholesale. 

                       

Gleefully the butcher cleaves, he cleaves. 

Proficient in the deconstructionist art of dismemberment. 

               

The police paying a visit whenever they  

find something especially grisly. 

 

Two kids under the age of three  

and a wife that talks in her sleep. 

 

Most of it pure gibberish. 

Like the wrath of the taxman  

after twenty beers.

Flipping my Mattress, I Think of Gymnasts 

 

Flipping my mattress, I think of gymnasts, 

of intricate floor routines that depend on the final dismount. 

the long run up to the spring board, 

that deceptive chasm of distance between the uneven bars, 

the rings seeming much more like some arcane torture device than sport, 
a wafer-thin beam underfoot and the questionable judging most of all; 

my mattress only subject to periodic flip and private folly,  

a gymnast just the same – 

my muscle-atrophied body hurts from nape to knickers  

at the thought of such exploits,        

so mattress flipped, I make up the bed and lie down 

a few more hours;                                      

silly peacock hair standing on end when I wake

and deep lines like ancient riverbeds cut from a dying land.

 

Bag of Guppies  

            

Listen kid – leaving the only pet store in a twelve mile radius playing  

peppermint patsy is hardly a good look, those pants that can't help  

but fall down without constant attention and that bag of guppies;  

1,2,3,4...count them fishy freshwater lifers, from South America like  

Neruda but with rainbows for bodies instead of words; a pocket full of  

fish food the saleslady with a rabbit's tooth swears by, that stupid  

deep sea diver figurine in the bottom of the tank that all the fish loath  

so much as they amuse us with their tiny imprisonments.

 

The Coo Birds Coo No More

At first, there were two –

a pair like any other:

singing, nesting, lost to new love,

then the cat showed up

mangy at first but slowly nursed back to health

by guilt, renewal and blunder 

so that the coo birds coo no more;

the male was first to go, he the much louder

and more demonstrative of the bunch,

braver to his own demise,

then the female as she awaited the arrival

of her young,                 

the head torn off and missing,

just the bottom half of the body

left strewn about the yard,

a few feathers and ants to seal the deal,

but no longer any song.

 

Weather Vane  

           

The button off my pants is a washboard skiffle band throwaway, 

some rooster-fed weather vane of yammering wind-tousled hair,  

o'er moor and mount, craggy abbey walls, dented mascara run lorries  

on the prowl; not an honest care in this careless world, library late fees  

and still never once that blighted honest care that leaves a dying man  

to feel something other than this crippling five-and-dime damp  

through failing bones.

Away, Away Say Distant Telescope Stars  

 

That conglomerate of latticed fencing – 

COUNT THE PARTS, THE OPTIONS! 

Failed constitutionals under Clipboard’s watchful eye, 

insect Kafka had it right to never leave home, 

scurrying into my escape artist mind, his bulging thorax of ideas; 

I will never park a car with human foot on failing brake pedal again, 

run through dog parks of aging dry humpers,  

exchanging numbers with pretty halter top mathematicians, 

pretending to like many of the things I don’t like at all. 

 

Locked in an elevator with three indigestions, 

two irritable bowels and one dysphagia. 

Waiting for the professionals to finally understand  

their profession, cut a hole large enough  

for the buttoned-down office romance slipstream  

crowd to tadpole through. 

                        
The printer out of paper again, 

you begin to wonder when clear-cut forests  

will stop holding back. 

 

Away, away say distant telescope stars. 

My curtains pulled over like a failed state. 

This pillow against my head 

and never once that cold black muzzle  

with one in the chamber. 

 

Collecting a pauper’s  

unfortunate lime  

rain.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.