Ryan Quinn Flanagan- Three Poems

Beware of Flowers

Renoir had just finished

the Great Bathers
and turned to paint
a still life of flowers
when he suffered a heart attack
and died.

He was 78,
not quite
79.       

The flowers didn’t seem to care
either way.

The flowers

stood over the body
drinking water
for three long
days                

before someone
noticed.



The Extinction of the Siberian Reindeer

All his letters came back.
Unopened
in postmarked stacks.
Somehow
this was more reassuring
than before.
When they just never answered back
at all,         
but kept the letters
and postage:
3-5 poems
a cover letter
the pages numbered,
sent out all over the country,
ignored in four time
zones.

A man can grow insane
surrounded by silence.

It was the hottest night of the year, so far.
Late July.

He sat shirtless on the bed, in his underwear,
flipping through a magazine:
The Extinction of the Siberian Reindeer,
the title of the article
read.
It was then that he decided
he would become
a reindeer
instead of a writer.
The world needed more reindeer,
it did not need more
writers.
He got out the want ads
and started looking.

Siberia
seemed a long way
away,
the airfare would not
be cheap.



A Compiler of Angry Phone Thoughts

Defile another toaster over
think Günter Grass
meets regular summer cut
grass,
and this morning
when I got up
there was breast cancer flamingos
through the parade square
and the issue
of blood in the stool
(again)       
and 34 messages
on the machine
by the phone
so I had something
to listen too
over eggs         
and bacon        
and fresh squeezed
OJ.



Bio: Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a wheezing asthmatic who enjoys short walks on the beach. He lives deep in the Canadian Shield with his toaster oven and his muse, believing himself to be eternally hungry as many his poems are about food.