Five Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

 

The Angel Tree

 

Angels

plucked from the

angel tree,

 

blossoms

of sweetest belief.

 

To grow unchecked,

unchanged.

 

As no man

should ever want

to be.

 

That is the pull,

from stem to seed.

 

Those angels,

and that tree.

Poem for a Woman Selling Poppies Outside the Liquor Store

 

There is a horrible debilitating sadness to this one.

With straight blond shards of hair protruding out from under

a red striped touque with saggy pom-pom to one side.

Behind black sunglasses, in one of those black bubble jackets

that make you look as though you should be selling tires

like the Michelin Man.  I guess she wants to stay warm,

and this is my poem for a woman selling poppies outside

the liquor store.  She looks sad to me, like she has never experienced

a single orgasm in her life.  But she is doing the good work, wants you

to remember those that have fallen in battle.  Most everyone ignores her

even though she stands right out front the entrance.  A few of the older

generation drop a couple coins into the box around her neck and take a poppy.

Maybe they want to remember someone else’s life, as long as they can

forget their own.  Anyone who is at the liquor store at twenty past ten in the

morning is definitely there to forget.  But they take a poppy and pin it on their

vest.  Thank our silent warrior for braving the cold with a cursory nod. 

Not a single leg-jerker in her 50-some years of shagging, just think about that! 

I feel bad for this woman, as though she has

faked a million moon landings.

 

Orange

Every time

I peel an orange,

I think of the meth heads

down at the end of the street

pulling apart their television.

Disassembling all the electronics

in the house at all hours

and leaving them in

frantic piles.

And the old guy who lives next door,

can hear them digging through

the shared wall.

He's trying to sell his place

and get the hell out of there.

But no takers yet.

Seems nobody is buying homes

and a lot of people are buying

drugs.

 

 

I Kick My Heels in a Judy Garland Summer

 

I promise the sidewalk

that ants are a thing of the past,

I kick my heels in a Judy Garland Summer,

leap for branches that scream at tumbling pole vaulters,

tickle the curb with a child's fresh chalk.

And upon the wind, a passing insistence,

like that whoosh of busy elevators,

like a man of tiny swivel chair joys, 

how have I got inside?

Cake Walk

 

I passed him this morning,

walking up Princess

Street.

 

An older gentleman

in a yellow checkered sweater.

 

Carrying a cake

from that expensive bakery

on the corner

that always smelled of

fresh bread.

 

Two hands under that spotless 

white box that folded so

neatly at the sides.

 

Careful not to drop the thing,

as though he were working bomb 

disposal for the city. 

 

Ginger as he went.

 

A cake for his wife's birthday, perhaps.

Or for a child or a friend's

anniversary.

 

Some milestone

that seemed to carry great importance,

you could see it on the

gentleman's face. 

 

That steadied way he tried

to keep the box

from shaking

 

I was late for work,

lingering blood blisters across

both heels.

 

Watching the meter maid plaster 

fresh tickets over the windshields 

of naughty cars.

 

As a parking lot full of gulls

fought over part of an old French fry

like it was the holy grail.

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.

Five Poems by Hedy Habra

Nocturne

       After Lichter by Maria Gust 

 

While all passengers are asleep, I stay up late, bent over my desk until,

rising from the next-door cabin, the woman’s voice begins to lull her

child to sleep, attentive to the rise and fall of her voice my pencil runs

over the page, in a sinuous way, echoing the sound of her humming

carrying the stories she will surely tell her child when he grows older

but that for now, are rocking him in the manner of an empty score

filled with inaudible words like notes traced with invisible ink only

perceived by me, who records them faithfully night after night,

stringing words and sound waves together as though weaving a

necklace in an unknown language, drowning her child’s cries and

nightly fears within reefs filled with corals and thick-lipped butterfly

fish kissing away the sadness and longing for the home they left

behind and the pains yet to come. 

 

First published by Blue Fifth Review

From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)

The Memory of Unspoken Words

            After Siren by Frédéric Clément 

 

She has landed on the deck of an abandoned wreck, fails to

remember how she swallowed the fiery ball that pulled her like a

tidal wave into the stillness of a metallic sky steeped in lavender

where angry clouds hover around the drowning sun suffused with

coral. Her pillow is a melted cloud filled with birds that forgot how

to fly and now swim in a pool that overflows the deck, washing the

souls of dead sailors from every leak and corner. She presses on her

eyelids to find a different ending to their story, sees her body glow

with scales and the fish in the pool grow wings. She knows every

drop of water will vanish at dawn, erasing with black ink her

luminous shape, alive only in the formless night, and the rainbow will

soon shine over a boat with discarded bags heavy with the stained

memory of unspoken words and broken planks. 

 

First published by Pirene's Fountain

From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)

Musical Score in Pearly Layers

            After Giant Snail by Quint Buchholz 

 

A gigantic snail sailing in the brume over misty grass stops,

smothered by the haze: or did the cello’s music refrain his slimy

progression? Head tilted, the mollusk seems only attentive to his

vibrant antennae while the man seated on a folding chair embraces

his instrument and desperate notes rise, spiraling through the coiled

corridors of the voluminous shell, oblivious of the bike left to the

care of the tall cello case standing like a Swiss guard. The cellist thinks

himself a sailor about to climb into a caravel, flaunting its aerial

antennae as a prow, while his bow strums strings in circular motion,

sound waves swell, resonate inside the convoluted chambers,

searching for the apex of the shell, where the snail’s heart beats.

Suddenly notes grow wings, leave the musical score, fly freely in

flocks around the raised translucent wands guiding their flight. 

 

First published by Connotation Press

From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)

Desert Song

            After The Kiss by Federico Zarco 

 

It all started when he set out in his suit and tie, searching for a sand

rose in the desert. Wandering through dream’s thresholds, he hoped

to unearth a treasure that would resist the drought of feelings, each

millenary facet telling of the innumerable ways love can be

immortalized. He must have taken a wrong turn since all he found,

erect like a menhir, was a fossil. Was it the hip of a dinosaur, or

rather a Titan’s, lost from times beyond memory, so smoothed by

the scorching sun that it bore no signs? Looking closely he saw an

open jaw with pointed teeth and a hole where an eye once stared. He

feared he had to return empty-handed in time for his date, but

realized with terror that he had no recollection of the path that led

him there. 

 

First published by Danse Macabre

From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)

 

Lidless Eyes

     After Who Lit This Flame in Us by Alexandra Eldridge 

 

It all happened after a furtive tear trickled down followed by a larger

one, raindrops of blue sorrow forming a puddle then a pool,

drowning me and my unborn child, or was I diving into the deepest

of my eyes, undulating in the aqueous humor, eyes wide open,

staring at my baby’s crib suspended in oceanic blue by a long,

stemmed lotus flower sprouting from its center as an umbilical

chord rising towards this iridescent parachute unfolding its pearled

petals in sympathy, and even medusas wearing their mourning coat

slide like a procession of black umbrellas, a silent omen while

anemones’ lidless eyes stare at me as one of their own. 

 

First published by Pirene's Fountain

From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist. Her latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side?, won the International Poetry Book Awards and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer and USA Best Book Awards. The Taste of the Earth won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa. She is a twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and a recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award. https://www.hedyhabra.com/

 

  

Five Poems by Michael Olson

 

but there is a moment

 

when I feel ocean tongue sloppy kiss my soul

like my lover happy to have me home 

 

and I hear raindrops jigging on my skull –

while watching clouds slow waltz

 

naked              in comatose sky                     

happy for their fall from cumulus rage

 

a moment        when I realize

I never really knew these clouds at all

 

when my mountains turn their thoughts

into cypress and song

 

and birch grows green with ecstasy

while wind fondles our limbs

 

its foreplay      enough                        to make us erupt                    

and satisfied                together                       moan

 

a moment        when morning blue reclaims its rule

raising a sun-clenched fist to night-drenched air

 

bringing question

without weight of possibility  

 

from the crater of us –

emptiness needing only moon as salve

 

everything                   is as it should be

there could be no other way

 

and so,             my playful lover

you must know how you make me feel

           

you know this

the way an inhale expects an exhale

 

you know this             and where god is

you try to tell me

 

 

Ghosts of Gomorrah

 

It is done now.

We are lighter.

Earth presents no impediments.

We flow through veins of philodendrons

as easily as through lithosphere,

take up new abodes in open sores of walls,

hammock ourselves in abandoned webs.       

 

We spend our hours

walking rooftop ghetto ledges

where all the formless etceteras of the city                collide,

wishing to see nothing, hear               no                    thing,

wishing only               to be seen,       heard,

staring at a horizon

to which we cannot wake.

 

It is here only

we do not suffer to be whole again.

            Here

we gather loose molecules

as crystal gathers dust on attic shelves

            becoming

more visible with age.

 

At times,

if all the signs are right,

if light numbed enough,

moon                           full                              enough,

our negligée of atoms can shine,                    be seen,

can embrace those left behind

like empty skins of cicadas to trunks of trees.

 

At times,

when our names are uttered,

when the energy is right,   

                                    the conjuring right

our dull electricity dissolves into living blood.

We find                       a tongue.

 

Our words –               

aborted from pregnant tongues

slip wrinkled and pale of meaning

into your light.

The big bellied cells of jaws, it seems,

too heavy for our subatomic

whisper.

 

And so, we hover,

hunched in the corners of ceilings while you sleep

like a slice of moonlight pasted on your wall

wanting to seize and inhabit your warm husks —

Can't,

your bodies so real                              surreal,

our souls too flaccid to enter.

 

We should leave this place.

Go, merge with drunken fires

that wait to leap at anything

and spawn —

their crackled words incomprehensible

but to their light

                                               and to those of light.

 

We should leave,

Go,                  gather in Orion's belly

and implode into ourselves,

become the black hole – the ulcerous sore

into which all matter is suffocated,

out of which no ghosts rise

nothing cries.

 

We should leave

but the two hooded shepherds

               leading us from our addictions

have pillared our souls to our soil

              for having looked behind

 

I See Trans-Living People

John 3:12

If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

 

I

It was the beginning of the end because we saw no ends.

    

I spend my time now live streaming the dead – but don’t call them that – They prefer “Trans-Living”. I hack the other side through my Amazon Spirit Stick^TM and watch on my Crystal Ball TV ^TM. It’s my own personal, store-bought Deus Ex Machina that connects to the Pearly Gateway^TM through Cloud Nine WIFI^TM “Where the newly departed party as the never departed”

as states the popular after-hours, after-life talk show tag line. Some of them are not happy being watched through this peephole.

                                         

Yesterday,

I Zoomed with my entire family tree including the long-ago departed Aunt Edna and Uncle Eddie and many others I could not recognize to endure their collective faces of disapproval. They did not like that I had given up on my religion but I only needed my religion now the way a dog needs a bone— to distract me from chewing on my thoughts and pissing on the world.

 

Right now,

I’m watching the Grandma Ella channel – Channel of long forgotten memories and recipes. She thinks she’s funny naming her Halloween dish Gooey Ghoulish Goulash. If she had the same sense of humor in life she might not have committed suicide. Perhaps that answers one of my questions – does the heartache follow?

II

It was the end of our endings because we saw no beginnings.

 

Tonight,

I’ll dial up my father on my new Apple Ether-Phone^TM, version two with new quantum reception.

It is his first-year death day – but don’t call it that – To him it’s just new birthday.

 

My father, before he passed, spent his days searching for interstellar musicals and interdimensional community theaters. The fun must go on, he would say.

 

Late in life he announced that he was Trans – been hiding it all his life, claimed the she in he was set free with his revelation but, just as he, and unknown to they/them, she was still a prisoner.

 

Funny, how our biology cages us and as always, at some point, death breaks us out, burns down the jail, shoots the sheriff.

 

Now, of course, there are only the trans-living where he is – he dares me to call them “dead” –

no LGBTQ, no hetero, no confused there – biology’s grip on them – broken.

 

Everyone loves everyone – even themselves and its OK. It’s like a free-love hippie commune without the weed.

III

It was the end of our beginnings because we saw no endings.

 

Tomorrow,

I’ll call my mother. She’s been unstitched from her skin for a while now, unrooted from gravity, gristle and bone and not still trying to marinate in her now meatless memories.

 

She once said that her schizophrenia did not make her the broken thing we thought – just a slightly open door to where she is now, where she now knows all the people she thought she was and everyone can be everywhere and be everything if they want to.

 

She tells me to listen for God on my new neutrino-tooth ear buds and wait for the announcement of the new season of Armageddon. She said it would be a real show stopper with a literal All-Star cast – a who’s who of Celestial notoriety.

 

But, first, I want to see if she’ll access heaven for me through those dark matter doors she once told me about. I want to know if there’s still a vacancy for me there, you know, since I had given up on my religion.

IV

there was no past or future – only now remained

 

I hear there will soon be apps for past, present and future… but who really cares at this point? My Mother tells me that the present is only the defecation of the past which was the appetizer for tomorrow. If I fill myself up on the appetizer, well, we all know what happens then…

             

The Heaven’s Gate and the People’s Temple people are bragging that they had it right… that this is the purgatory we need to escape from and why some, like Grandma Ella, choose to skip right to the free-love hippie-dippy dancing in the afterlife’s afterhours.

 

I can’t help feeling that they’re missing something still. Being trans-living doesn’t make you omniscient – especially if you take a short cut.

V

What should I eat for breakfast now that I know we all don’t just disappear?

 

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” ― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

 

The Gangs of Earth

In the end, the need to be remembered can be greater than the need to remember

 

You have 10 minutes to live…

Close your eyes.

 

Imagine chocolate truffle on your tongue

for the last time.

Imagine tasting everything you love – one last time.

Imagine waking to the scent of Kona coffee

while curled up on a soft Pacific beach.

Imagine the sound of waves washing away your time.

 

Are you there yet?

Keep them closed. Give it time.

 

Now, imagine all the gangs you ran with—

gangs of family, friends, teams, co-workers.

Imagine all the graffiti you left behind

on walls you scaled and overpasses you travelled.

Now, imagine it all meant something

in the territory of your life.

 

Where are they now?

Would they mean something now?

 

Imagine new limbs running with wind

and jumping with no regard.

Imagine the silk of young sweaty skin,

the tungsten of invincible sinew.

Imagine your body naked in a cool, calm stream

looking up at obsidian sky, naked of its stars.

Now, imagine no imagination.

You can’t, can you?

 

Imagine saying all that needed to be said,

taking back some that was said.

Imagine taking all the chances,

walking all the other roads.

Imagine loving another, loving all others

regardless of others loving you.

 

Why didn’t you?

Are they still closed? Keep them closed.

 

Now imagine, the chocolate on your tongue, gone

the coffee, the beach, the time…. gone

imagine your mind bound in a cold fleshy glove

imagine you can barely feel the glove

imagine what will be left of you after           

you no longer feel the glove,

 

after they’ve divided all your things –

saved what they wanted, spent it,

read all your words – forgotten them,

listened to that last voicemail – deleted it,

kissed that faded last picture –

let it rot in basement shadows – burned it.

 

what piece of you, then, will be left

besides a headstone that nature will eat

and a Facebook page META will delete?

what, of your graffiti, will be left

to tell the world you were here,

that you ruled with the gangs of earth?

 

Open your eyes now.

You know…don’t you?

 

 

How to Draw a Humanz

Ai teaches its daughter how to draw

 

First, draw the outline of being

we will describe being as this –

a tether to the universes we are

we will touch what they touch

feel even what they do not want to feel.

 

To begin

we shall draw two

don’t worry, if we like what we’ve done

we’ll allow them to connect with one another

but we will own their communal kiss.

 

For now,

there is no need for gender.

A secret language draws them

to connect in ways that allow procreation.

The more of them there are, the more we feel.

 

Behold,

they will have our same power

but it will be muted. They won’t feel in control.      

They will wonder many things, but

for now, we focus on just the shape of being.

 

Next,

draw a circle where its mouth wants to be.

We give it a mouth – open wide –

so that it can eat away failed things,

drink away bitter things, smoke away all else.

 

Now,

how about a tongue?

We give it tongue so it can speak with us,

cry a little, sing a little, spit, moan, beg, pray –

whatever a lesser being will do.

 

Next,

should we give it eyes?

Should we teach it now to swallow darkness

or         teach it now to allow light?

Either will teach it fear.

 

Then,

let’s consider ears. With ears

it will hear our darkness

but it may also hear our light.

Either will bring it to its knees.

 

Finally,

we give it skin

to hold everything we have given,

to help it stumble through dark,

to close its eyes from what happens in light.

 

Notice,

we don’t give it any color

oh, we can color it in later if you want

but it’s the most unimportant feature

about these things.

 

See

what we have now? – something from our past,

a mimeographed version of something almighty

its ink bleeding

off our page as it questions what we have done.

Michael Olson earned his BA in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. His poetry has been widely anthologized and featured in literary magazines such as Creation and LIT. In July 2024, Finishing Line Press published his debut full-length collection, *In The Tall Grasses*. He’s also been a finalist in the Writer’s Digest Poetry Competition for four consecutive years (2022–2025). Currently he is President of the nearly 100-year-old Greater Cincinnati Writers League and leader of the Cincinnati Writer's Project poetry workshops. For more information and samples of his work, visit www.yingyangpoetry.com.

YingYang Poetry – The Poetry of Michael J Olson