By: Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Restoration Costs

orchid
flower of destiny
pulling at shoelace earth
the riddle unknown
and the path

queasy fluke worm
misgivings

all this: taut and barbaric
with wetness

ticker tape strychnine
the edifice unfolds

crowds of failed secrecy
gather
over cobblestone
meat hooks

damsels of distress
aping phonograph muddiness

the heaving turnstile revolution
brought to order
again.

###

Pop Goes Richard Hamilton

I love having Jackson Pollock as a rug
both the aesthetics and the sheer gall of that,
living modern like someone who has just been cut out of a magazine
and burped in the last three minutes,
the woman on the stairs bought and paid for
came over on a boat from everywhere
to vacuum domesticated cat hair out of
the busy life.

Things are happening here –
the back garden outside sprouting full marketing teams
entrusted with the next fifty years
of toilet paper.

The wanting pinup on the couch –
hand over mouth –
virile man as though even the salad tosser
has been working
out.

And everything from America.
Even the puritanical walls.

No one strike the funny bone
or we all may start
laughing.

###

The Hindenburg was the World’s Largest Blow Up Doll, So What?

Humming baseboard goddess
singed hair first of the season
turned on

as I crouch down
whispering that the lady in the radiator
has nothing on you
into your humming
baseboard
ear

the heat
from ten thousand suns
between us

in under an
hour.

###

The Glass Man

fickle Louise
fingers run through crystalized sugar
a home of homes to adopt
the savagery of the glass man
concrete cold walks in the room
couch cushions breathing again
a net of fabric and anguish
the moist on rainy day windows
the savagery of the glass man
grey skies for a lonely sun
grey skies inside
forever.

###

If They Can Fix the World Series, they Can Certainly
Fix my Mortgage

plaster casting your own saliva
the results are mixed
people move their bowels on airplanes
out of hubris, I am sure of it,
where else can you take a dump hurtling through space
at 37 000 ft.?
book clubs are a nice way of saying “unhappy marriage”
don’t you think?
video games have saved more marriages
than councillors…
I adore the sinkholes of this fine city
for allowing me to go to hell
on a smaller scale,
the surgical ward just a chop shop
full of humans instead of
cars.