Five Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

 

Chance Meeting in the Hall

 

You should know that I set the whole thing up

because I am the hall.

 

I kept making myself smaller and smaller until there

was nothing left for you to do but run into each other.

 

This chance meeting in the hall, or so it would seem.

Just a momentary glance, but that’s enough.

 

Squished together awkwardly like these twin

couplets if we are honest.

 

You made me smile.

The hall is happy, you should know that.

 

Yakuza Glory

 

I love all those Yakuza movies out of Japan.

Filmed in Tokyo in that perpetual noir-ish rain.

Bankrolled by the Yakuza themselves,

there is a level of neon glorification.

Not all the time, but enough to notice.

All that honour and betrayal spilling out

of the soup can, into a heated pot

on the stove.  Octopi from other planets

scouring of salty oceans for all the best looks.

Hedy Lamarr picking broken needles out

of Howard Hughes’ roaming JW arms. 

And my loyalty has become a fleet of

broken telephone transport trucks.

If you see me roaring down the freeway,

pull your guts out from your treehouse

and wait for the sawmill to see its

own shadow.  Six more weeks of treachery

and enough sodium to fill the gills

from gear to shift.

 

Head Shop Rastafarian

 

I love that tri-coloured beanie

you wear like a hacky sack

the boys in blue can’t stop kicking around

when the new mayor decides to get tough

on crimes that are not his own

 

and the funding that comes down

always comes down on the people

who have never had it

 

some call it money;

others, donations or the vig…

 

As I pet the twin-peppered stone manes

of statuesque lions

outside the public library.

 

Look for Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat

tilting uneasily in the inner harbour.

 

The summer patio crowd

kicking easy heels.

 

That crinkly sample size way the chocolatier

with bad hair

wraps everything in colour

like individual galaxies that always end

at the register.

 

Patsy Maker

 

Pull out the counting machine,

even the closet is coming out of the closet these days,

sitting around in government-funded sun chairs

looking for a patsy maker to turn everyone into overly

culpable sandwiches; magic bullets on state safari,

slow the motorcade down to half a dozen garden slugs

working their way up the pressure treated fence line –

Mr. Sirhan did it in the kitchen with a gun; Clue is such

a fun game to play, so many more laughs than all those

hours of Hungry Hungry Hippos during food scarcity,

who would of thought some yuppie fusion food truck

would let you down, be your undoing like

swearing in cursive so the paddle leaves the canoe

and finds that puckered sandstorm of your ass –

do you like my Carlos the Jackal shades, dig them

like sloppy sandcastles below the waterline

of kill shot forethought?  The brains spilling out

over the seat fabric like breaking the yoke

at some greasy spoon diner that burns the bacon

so you can’t taste the pig and his heavy club

that seems to always come down in crowds.

 

Everyone Hoping to Be Redeemed like Expired Coupons

 

Christ is in Brazil, picking up the malaria,

and just because the robot mosquitoes aren’t the real McCoy,

doesn’t mean they can’t create a buzz; I haven’t seen modern

science so hot on anything since it tried to open Windows 95

for the first time and enjoy such a functionally systematic breeze

and as things grow so much more iffy in such a jiffy,

I see the glowing prayer candle crowd giving secular arsonists

a run for their money; everyone hoping to be redeemed

like expired coupons, ushered back into the theatre

at this late hour with a family-sized popcorn on

a Big Gulp sugar water high.

 

I don’t sit a chance, not even in chairs without arms

like cosmetic amputees.  Those Hell hounds in the next yard

trying to eat through the fence to get at me. 

 

The black town car driven to the airport by some young thing

that has never taken off himself.  With ear buds and a gas card

and that sublime statuesque way he holds the trunk open

like a Doric column that’s had more body work

than some sad forgotten chicken wire Van Gogh

the art restoration junkies can’t stop plunging their

hungry turpentine brushes down into like losing

someone else’s virginity for them.

 

See you tonight, at some sketchy Motel 6 by the state line.

That constant whoosh of journeymen cars through a passing rain.

I’ll be that human waterfall throwing cold sink water

over the dangling dime heavy bag of my face.

If you have to ask for a map, then it was never love or lust

or anything else.  Hungry bedbugs all through these

unforgiving Jericho walls.  The sounds of the living always

replace that slippery tadpole memory of the dead.

 

Some skinny mystery burner pimp on the phone,

sending girls to all the rooms.  All I need is a sudden

unbroken sleep.  A few hours away from the dying light.

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.