Poetry: Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Stockholm Syndrome Never Left Sweden

it is a curious creeper

when you can only remember

the things you don’t

want to

the birdman of Alcatraz

laying an egg

in the model inmate

sense

how

Stockholm syndrome

never left Sweden

Busgy Siegel riddled

with bullets like a shooting range

in a thousand dollar suit

and those many “Can’t Even”

novelty coffee mugs in the store

that are large enough to hold

half the Spanish

armada

the way a baseball

through a window is

never a homerun

and sitting up in bed

this morning 

I thought about Robert Johnson’s

guitar in an old tin shack

I have never met

and how the moon could be

heavyweight champ of the world

if its light hits anything

just right

or how

imagination

is the art

of pulling dreams

out of the air

and making them

your own.

Flavour

My wife gets back

with an ice coffee from

the McDonalds drive-thru

and tells me they are now

charging you for flavour.

She says you can get plain

or pay 40 cents extra

for them to add flavour.

I think she is kidding at first.

She tells me she is not kidding.

Imagine if restaurants did that,

I say,            

here’s your meal, but it will

cost extra is you want it to taste

like something.

She laughs

and tells me I take everything

too far.

I tell her nothing is taken far enough.

That the road crew filling potholes

down the 108 will probably stop

halfway through just to prove

my point.

What do you want for dinner tonight?

she asks.

Hopefully something with flavour,

I say.

That’ll cost ya,

she laughs.

                         

Don’t I know it.

Bouncing Brothers

My grandpa on my father’s side

came from poor Irish potato farmers

and in his early twenties he landed a job

as a bouncer at this dive and his two older brothers

would come in get drunk and make trouble

so that my grandpa had to bounce his own

brothers, and this would happen on an almost

weekly basis which seems quite strange to me,

but apparently there were no problems

between the brothers, it was just what needed

to happen at that time.  And later, my grandpa got

a job as bus driver.  By the time I was born, he was

no longer a bus driver.  He was just my grandpa until

he died of emphysema.  I remember sitting on the floor

in front of him hearing the suctioning of fluid.  Watching

the FA cup final between Liverpool and Manchester United

on the television.  Too afraid to turn around

and see all those tubes and machines

and terrifying sounds.

Double Parked Seagull

I am driving back into town

past the Hillside Walk-in Clinic

when I spot this overstuffed seagull

sitting in an otherwise vacant

parking lot.

He is double parked.

Spilling over the yellow line.

Taking up two spaces with

his sheer size.

His eyes are a devilish red.

Staring straight ahead.

Never once deviating.

I search where he is looking.

There is nothing.

This bird is a stoic, I think

to myself.

He has one hell of a

poker face.

When I pull into my drive

the front light is still on

from the night before.

I welcome the sun

on my arms

for some minutes

before walking

in.

Garbo Speaks

Those papers on the racks with their many stories

and the newsman who is happy to take your money,

but depressed about everything else

his moustache thick as a mop and half as useful

taking up residence on his face, seemingly unconcerned

about property tax, the gentrification of the homeless

into near competent coffee baristas with fancy baby book names

and the uniforms they sport like corporate skins

hides that once provided warmth now with functional

name tag fixtures; the Scandinavians would be pleased

if for no other reason than that they are allowed

to leave Scandinavia: Garbo speaks

and her voice is that of a disgruntled newsman,

I imagine him at home with clingy children attached to each leg

like snotty shin guards, unable to forget their names

because he has bequeathed them,

and when it rains the papers get wet

the ink running down the pages so that all

the stories bleed into one.

Setu, May 2018