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, Impspired Magazine, GloMag, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review. 

Wondering Why Stained Glass Doesn’t Just Clean Up Its Act

All these people saying the world has gone 
crazy all the time,
I figure it’s just catching up,
pissing in the ice tray with raised flag pole leg,
pressing the blood-flush pink back 
into fingernail puller absentia, wondering why stained glass 
doesn’t just clean up its act if all those blues 
are a real cry for help and not just some acoustic 
allegorical masterpiece that meets on Sundays 
like hangovers for everyone else.

Komorebi 

Drugless eyes on the space filter, 
the people of Lemuria in my Komorebi head - 
by penchant, by perchance, we need a byline; 
some way to understand why the leaves have curled 
like busy cigars, a question of light before  
everything else, William Blake's The Ghost of a Flea 
forever on loan and that spunky hockey man  
who calls teeth "chicklets" working the PA down at  
the arena with a thrilling wasabi pungence: 
my time in no man's army is up, 
night cap invitations go unanswered as fog horns 
while splinters of a dying allegiance cut across 
the lattice fencing, all fury melts away like  
some sticky cold season lozenge.
 

Photographs Don’t Leave a Scent

They say to hedge your bets 
is to become a property line, 
ok, they don’t really say that, but they should
and photographs don’t leave a scent,
throw that firecracker of a nose in the air,
nothing betrayed all the way back to informant zero,
a hairless chest for broken microphones;
the smiles that were there are gone now,
eagerness across young faces tongue pillars of salt,
a bug across the lens, this foot-fleet way that line never holds;
just a flash of over-exposure then we are gone.