Mop, Without Bucket
You can't lose someone else's mind
and here I was walking over polished floors,
passing this mop on the half-lean,
like spaghetti curls that mothers hope for with their child
even though the entire hair history of the family
is nothing but straw,
and I wondered about the bucket,
what things with wheels get up to while the rest
of us are picking our noses in slow motion,
if this was alien abduction or the simple misplaced;
the smell of ammonia over everything like
a clingy ex turned to cellophane.
Nooks for Cranny
Hands in the dark are simple supplication,
fingers joined together like some dirty dexterous militia
on white-knuckled maneuvers into the hinterlands,
camouflage and nooks for cranny,
spotty crocodile tears with all the emotional ammunition
so that my knees begin to open at the bowleg
like twin drawbridges to a castle that has never housed
a single princess, crown or coffers
which is why I breathe the air I am given,
stand beside paintings large as bull elephants
of turpentine and tusk,
regale in the lives of the artists
as though they were my own
so that anything I may surrender is just a simple smile
in passing and never each one of those juicy
ecstatic brushstrokes.
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, Fixator Press, GloMag, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
You can't lose someone else's mind
and here I was walking over polished floors,
passing this mop on the half-lean,
like spaghetti curls that mothers hope for with their child
even though the entire hair history of the family
is nothing but straw,
and I wondered about the bucket,
what things with wheels get up to while the rest
of us are picking our noses in slow motion,
if this was alien abduction or the simple misplaced;
the smell of ammonia over everything like
a clingy ex turned to cellophane.
Nooks for Cranny
Hands in the dark are simple supplication,
fingers joined together like some dirty dexterous militia
on white-knuckled maneuvers into the hinterlands,
camouflage and nooks for cranny,
spotty crocodile tears with all the emotional ammunition
so that my knees begin to open at the bowleg
like twin drawbridges to a castle that has never housed
a single princess, crown or coffers
which is why I breathe the air I am given,
stand beside paintings large as bull elephants
of turpentine and tusk,
regale in the lives of the artists
as though they were my own
so that anything I may surrender is just a simple smile
in passing and never each one of those juicy
ecstatic brushstrokes.
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, Fixator Press, GloMag, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
