Poetry: Selections From Ryan Quinn Flanagan

“The doctor will see you now”

Sitting around with all the other sickos.

Some with mystery illnesses, others with the predictable drip.

Puffy eyes and hoarse cough beside stacks of torn magazines.

"The doctor will see you now."

Marlowe's Tamburlaine leaps up with a false confidence.

Like a man who uses other kings as footstools,

when in reality, he cries himself to sleep each night.

A hive of honied lies.  And the truth is no better:

hunched over, skeletal, shaking limbs weak with fever.

Lips swollen and cracked, the constant clearing of phlegm.

"The doctor will see you now," that monotone voice comes again.

I follow it into a cold clinical room in the back.

The doctor is uninspired, already in early retirement.

Hair sticking out of his ears at all angles.

He prescribes me something for a pain I have never mentioned.

Western medicine is now nothing but pill mill pushers

and pharmacy scripts.  I will be back home within the hour.

With my two times daily and a couple refills.

Glassy-eyed and watching old reruns of Love Connection.

 

 

Prospects

You never knew 

what you'd get at 

the sperm bank.

 

She much preferred

sitting in the parking lot

of Mr. Big & Tall,

hunting down her

prince charming.

 

Excited

at her prospects,

the thought

of the genetics

involved.

 

Their children

would be sprawling

and beautiful.

 

Like runaway plumes

through summer

gardens.

 

 

 

 

 

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, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Horror Sleaze Trash, Rusty Truck, Red Fez, Fixator Press and The Oklahoma Review.  He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.