Friday, February 21, 2020

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

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