RYAN QUINN FLANAGAN

Jailhouse Confessions 

are not as rare 

as one would think

after the guilt and want 

of freedom

and unscrupulous snitches 

looking for less time

all conspire to expedite 

the process

and the guards 

that don’t leave bruises

and the warden/mayor 

up for re-election

so incarceration can remain 

privatized and turn a healthy profit

locking more and more away 

so the others all have jobs

and then there are the 

mentally ill bused in 

to 3000% capacity 

after the hospitals closed

confessing to anything 

put in front of them 

so the books can be cleared

and none of the men.

Gullible Fish Pulled from Ancient Streams Again

The heightsean dizzy,

no wonder the dead don’t come up for air,

I haven’t been marginalized since they stopped scrawling 

rolling bookshop indecencies in all the margins;

it’s a barn cat’s dust and greying beards of scraggle,

bedroom symphonies to fallen basement gods,

itching nefarious ivy, questions of biological enhancement,

the yang and the ying in sudden quizzical agreement:

boney dino exhibits, mason jar pantries, gullible fish pulled 

from ancient streams again… 

the reason he has not called is because the telephone 

has not been invented in any real sense,

the ear piece hearing only what it wants to hear

while the mouthpiece tries to get elected;

it’s wires crossed off the list,

electrical flim flams in the stumbling cross-eyed zeitgeist,

that measly way the swear jar over the fridge never gives back,

munition dumps full of old arguments you never won,

dispatchers of drones working their way back out of the hive;

I’ve never seen a Minotaur, food trucks are just bulls with wheels

and a single horn…

Scratchy records from discount mountain tops,

 the air so thin it must be dieting. Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and mounds of snow.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Dope Fiend Daily, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review