Five Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

 

The 250 lbs Leprechaun Outside the Community Bingo 

 

You could tell the beard was fake, 

some ginger ass dollar store apparatus,   

but the belly was real as smoker’s cough hacking up  

a lung, and I watched him  

replace the town crier in hours of desperation, 

handing out flyers for Lucky Tuesdays, 

squawking out the same sad promise over and over again: 

“double the jackpots, double the winners!” 

I looked around.  There were no winners. 

Only lonely old women who stroked purple haired trolls 

in smoky dark halls for luck. 

A few with moustaches thicker than their husbands 

that would no longer take them to bed. 

Hoping to win the big one, colour coordinated  

daubers all set out in a row.  

And the 250 lbs leprechaun outside the community bingo 

making promises he could never keep.

 

If You Could 

 

If you be a lamb, would you settle for wool? 

If you could be a letter, should you arrive unannounced? 

If you could be a harp, caught up in twisted tuneful strings. 

If you could be a stamp, so foolishly licked by the world. 

 

If you could be a fur hat, would you wander after warmth? 

If you could sit in dark stairwells, under the chins of winsome spiders. 

If you could be a magazine stand, with all the latest gossip. 

If you could cry at rice weddings like some church organ sentimentalist. 

 

If you could be a stag frothing, under the whips of tiny men. 

If you could sneak onto rides too tall for the slipping sun. 

That mingling of flowers, so your eyes can burst with fire.   

If you could play those old records, joyous feet might  

return to dance.

 

Stuck in An Elevator with Self-Replicating von Neumann Probes  

 

Discomfort is for fools 

who are aroused by the suddenness  

of Christmas crackers, 

and it was watching the steady climb of those  

unencumbered red numbers 

that I found myself stuck in an elevator  

with self-replicating von Neumann probes, 

one had become many until I was up against the wall, 

and they looked the same like children of the corn, 

only, there was mechanics where there should be biology, 

I really felt the starch of my collar, let me tell you. 

When the door opened up, I bolted for  

my late afternoon colonoscopy  

like a man who can’t wait to cough  

on command.

 

Mammaries Mistaken for Mountain Ranges 

 

You hire a sherpa who claims to know all the best passes. 

Pay the man in screeching squirters that can’t help but go for  

the distance record.  So he can lead you through the driving snow, 

the blinding squalls.  You begin to feel like Dante with his guide, 

only you are headed in the opposite direction.  To the promising peaks, 

sucking limited air at elevation.  And the hands cup at nipples between the fingers. 

It is mammaries mistaken for mountain ranges.  That jiggling avalanche 

that can swallow a man instantly.  Grounded rescue choppers waiting for  

favourable weather that seldom arrives.  And if you are goners,  

there are always more adrenaline junkies to take up to cause. 

Another leather-faced sherpa with a month’s supplies. 

Bedroom daredevils breaking camp to continue the climb.

Max Beckmann’s Street at Night, 1913 

 

You can almost feel the war coming – 

all those buzzing modern contraptions on their heels, 

everyone together and yet alone, squished between those  

towering buildings with novel new balls of streetlight 

standing in for an absent moon.  Buildings awash in an awakened fire, 

but the crowds on the avenue remain strangely darkened.   

A frenzy of activity, seemingly without direction. 

I spill with blood-soaked eyes, knowing that monstrous  

damnedable flight so well.  How obscured we become in 

milk-mania derangements.  That agitated wilderness 

of clunk, hiss and whistle.

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.