By: Ryan Quinn Flanagan

A Child’s Birthday

Right of passage or loss of youth, you be the judge.
Candles extinguished and cake portioned off.
Wedged on paper plates to appease icing sugar mouths.
Geometrical precisions for the gift bag army.

To hear one’s name in song is thrilling.
To grow older still, as the climbing tree in the yard.
To tear at presents, with none of the weight.
Disposable camera captures from proud parents.

And friends on the ins and outs to varying degree.
Gathered in ceremony for a child’s birthday.
Have you become lost in that smile to warm the heart?
Failing to notice each departing hour.

Exaltation

Come reed or root, the storm-belly
sings, its unhalted tethers upon the land:
that is what the coyote trickster has come to tell you,
the scyther through all those paintings,
this range of curious devils traipsing through
the non-dream. Waking to a darkness
unknown to larger litters.

And that peril should clamber up your back
with sparked welder’s adhesion is precisely why
my pounding skull remains wrung through
with princely distortions, forgathering inscrutable
demands: any man who goes looking for trouble
should find it, I firmly believe this to be true.
Just as steel is struck by forge, and the seeping
porosity of fools convene.

What’s more: I have been left largely sleepless
for many weeks, it is the death of sleep, really.
Boatman pennies for eyes sail by like rich armies
of conquest. The taste of warm chocolate across my breath.
Dizzy with the untroubled jugglers who trade names
nimbly as wood deer.

Go tell the sprinting sandpiper,
that is what I’ll do.
Pull crabs from the ears of the earth,
and like the circling eagle on high,
exalt you through this way.

Parsecs

To float upon the wind as if butterflies in song;
that would be left to dream, if not for waking appetites unsung –
our diminutive yip, now peerless mountaineer;
why malingerers hold fast to spooning ladle
and burly fishmongers dig through buckets of market ice.

Not to become doomed to flagging revel,
as woolly mammoth in capitulated bog.
See the acrobats and their kicking legs.
Yearning to mine the ageless parsecs without knowing.
Forget the impertinent gaolers, that leering
cold steel they embody.

By signet ring, and dance of the motherly reeds.
By chance, perforce – whatever you wish to call it.
Big brother darkness into immeasurable light,
the burning lute and gondola reckonings.
This is how I wander most freely
in hourless contemplation.

In Times of Haste

In times of haste, a patient man sputters.
The graded papers fail to tell you this,
tucked away in the bottom drawer of a teaching desk.
Strangled in red marker and a mind outpaced.

On Susan – you stand correct.
(I would be remiss if I did not mention
the curling cenotaph of flowers brought indoors,
lines for the arching drink fountain.)

When I hand you this glass of gulps, this dashing tender.
Please don’t run in the halls, though I know you will.
Fast as bullet trains through the rolling thunder.

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Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Literary Yard, Setu, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.