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.
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.