Poetry: Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Ambient Savage

Big brother is little sister

sharing a bunk

the fingers of lepers

always leaving the

band

and I walk into the room

and all the walls have been

ex-communicated

not a Latin bone in my body

so that fishy cans from Sardinia

mean nothing to me

that salty red taste of split lips

after a fight

the way you can leave yourself

behind in the snow

and be somewhere else

completely

your ambient savage

scabbed across distant

knuckles

drying in the street

that stolen joyride cars

drive over.

Service

It is Veteran’s Day

and we are having lunch

on the Huntington

Beach pier.

Sitting by the window

in a Ruby’s Diner

watching the many Chinese fisherman

deboning their catch on tiny wooden slats

provided by the port authority.

And the young keep getting up

and going over to the tables of the old.

Thanking them for their service

to the country.

The old eat for free today.

As long as they come in full uniform.

A couple hookers come in and sit down

after a hard night’s work.

In uniforms of their own.

Before we leave,

I walk over to their table

and thank them for their service

to the country.

Then I walk out.

With many eyes upon me.

Bean Counters

One long table,

five to a side.

Without expression.

Lost to the numbers.

Units moved.

The bottom line.

Charting.

Arranging.

Tabulating…

Bean counters

of corporate art

amassing the

spoils.

In perfectly tapered suits.

The word: Accounting

stenciled into the

door.

Ink jet printers

restocked with paper,

four to a wall.

Spitting out the spreads

for the last quarter.

Real Roads Have Curves

We are driving past the hospital

where the dying and injured play their part

and we keep smashing down into all these potholes

while the snow obscures the lanes

and we almost run into each other on

the continuous blind curves

These roads are awful,

my wife says.

Why do there have to be some many

damn curves?

Real roads have curves,

I say.

I think you mean women,

she laughs.

No, I mean roads.

And when we stop for gas,

the road does not stop for us.

Musak over the loudspeaker

as I stick the nozzle in.

Flatbread and Sit-ups Had a Tryst

Any man who wipes his mouth with someone else’s mouth

leaves himself open to accusations of kissing,

this is not at all the bunched napkin love of Romeo and Serviette

or how it was when flatbread and sit-ups had that tryst

back in the 80s that ended quite masterfully in a line of popular instructional

exercise videos, and believe you me the village was talking –

you know the one, and the way things ended it seemed everything

else would start again: the spring, my car, this watch that hasn’t worked

in years, but still manages the rent each month,

and when Flora came by today I saw her wince crows’ feet

when I asked about Fauna, a joke I keep telling to amuse myself

at the expense of a rather good woman who waters the plants

and straightens up the bathroom and proofreads goddammit,

there is no love more treacherous than an editorial one,

editors are masochists that choose ampersands

over leather, reach blindness instead of orgasm…and after Flora left

Bill came over and told me how the Koreans were still at war

because of the 38^th so how could we ever trust their restaurants,

and not wanting to offend, I told him I had been at Inchon in spirit;

that MacArthur made me hump all that ammunition up the beachhead

for the cameras and then put everything away like a child

made to clean its room.

Setu, February 2018