3 Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan | Micro-Poetry | #thesideshow

With Blood Thinners as the Last Great Crash Diet

 

Pulling my own moustache hair out of my face

I think of billboards that no longer

have it.

 

Of water skippers lost to general toad hunger

and tired neon Broadway.

 

The way rats will give up on mazes

before science gives up on them.

 

It seems the hammer drops,

regardless of nail.

 

Asphyxiation could be a three letter word

without all that oxygen.

 

Renting a room at this motel by the water,

I promise to stay three nights.

 

I Am Nursing a Viper for the Roman People

 

hip to shovel tyranny, dig?

the spooks have been through your garbage again

searching out treachery and orange peels

gloved subterfuge by flashlight, by lamplight

do not alert the authorities to themselves

they get upset when you do that

their wives have it rough enough without your contributions

instead, let delusion have run of the house

empty cassette spools into the bathtub in the name

of false squid

walk backward for the entire evening

nurse vipers for the Roman people

and when the hounds are set upon you

your deception will be perfect

the steeping tea

box garden full of stamens

a suitor’s dust, flippant and inane,

marks lost to a growing childhood wall

above your previous standing,

validation of the growth-death cycle;

black town cars at every funeral

as though the whole of the automotive industry

is in mourning.

 

Continental Breakfast

 

An eater of land

chewing up the sharecroppers

into one giant ball

of indigestion

tectonic plates that have escaped

the dishwasher’s busied eye

locusts for fields buzzing around the afterlife

model trains to nowhere with engineers for brains

stamp collection and the accumulation of wealth,

sewer grating against it all –

did you really climb that mountain in the picture?

Photoshop can work wonders the church

can only dream of.

I appreciate how you had it framed.

Like a bay window in the absence

of water.

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About the Author

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his other half and mounds of snow. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Word Riot, Clockwise Cat, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.