Ryan Quinn Flanagan Returns With Sewing Machines, Cell Phone Bings, A Black Balaclava, Hot Tags, Absent Moms, And The Paternity Hive Drones

Where Uprisings Go When They Are Finished

She sits at a sewing machine by the window
admiring the rain.
I pretend not to know her
and the way she hums in the shower.
How her children are all grown now
and will have nothing to do with her.
I am laid up in bed with a cast on my foot.
Flipping through one of her many magazines
on how to please your man.
The sewing machine keeps jamming
so that I think she is doing it on purpose.
To get a rise out of me that is not in my pants.
She pretends not to notice the sweat on the back
of her neck. 
How could she not notice that?
And a vacuum from next door keeps running up
against the wall.
Sanity is a temporary thing,
like taking your dirty clothes
to the laundromat.
When it is over, she is back at the machine
and I am still laid up in bed.
On top of the covers in my boxer shorts.
Picking old food crumbs out of my chest hair
and looking at them, before tossing each
to the floor.

 
“YOUR CALL IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US”

She is waiting on the phone
for the next available customer
service representative.

Her call is apparently very important.
A voice keeps saying that as if
caught in a loop.

Then they play the same god awful muzak
over and over again.

I think this is what they play at Guantanamo
to drive the jihadis crazy,
I say,
really load them up on the high cholesterol
of bad days.

She waves me off
and makes her irritated face.

I wave back to her in that ridiculous way
the queen waves at everything
before leaving the room.

Then I go outside and shovel the driveway.
In a black balaclava that makes me look
as though I rob banks.
 
Disappointment 

Standing in line
with my wife at the Dollar Store
today

this guy in front of us
turns and says:
“these new cellphones bing each time
you walk into the mall and leave the mall
and you can’t disable the damn things,
they’re tracking you all the time, pretty scary!”

I don’t say anything.
The wife nods her head yes politely
which I guess is an invitation:

“everything is made in China,
he continues,
no wonder there are no jobs
anymore.”

Again, I say nothing.
The wife follows suit.

She is learning all the time.

The guy seems to want to continue
the conversation with himself,
but the cashier calls him forward.

It is a great disappointment
to us all.

 
Chop Shop

the cars just kept coming
so that you were never out of work
and Delvin worked on the tags,
removing the hot ones and replacing them
with new ones;
the job wasn’t hard, not like the welders
and chop boys had to do
and even though the pay wasn’t fantastic
everyone got paid under the table
which meant a lot,
it meant your take home was
nothing to scoff at
and in a city where honest work is hard to come by,
dishonest work becomes the top employer
and since Delvin was small and not good at breaking legs
and didn’t want to hold up or have to kill anyone,
he took a job “cleaning the tags,”
laughing to himself each time he thought
about those take your kids to work
days of his youth.
 
Making a Change

You leave thinking you love her.
That you should make a change.
That is what she is paid to do.
It just means that she is good at her job
and you are bad at marriage.

I’m sure she didn’t tape it.
Blackmail is a whole different profession.
And diseases?  Well she seemed like a clean enough girl.
Knew where the shower was and everything.

Don’t worry about this motel.
It’s where open warrants hide out.
And you paid in cash.
Under some ridiculous false name.

You should probably pull your wedding band
back out of your sock though.

Drive home
and tuck your children
into bed.

That father of the year cup
always waiting beside the coffeemaker
each morning.

 
It’s a Small World 

I am standing outside the restrooms
at the Walmart in Sudbury
waiting for my wife.

Watching this little girl
work the steering wheel
of this 25 cent machine
in the shape of a car
which she sits in
as it plays:
It’s a Small World
over and over
again.

“Look mommy!,”
the little girl says to
this rail thin woman
standing by her.

Presumably the mother.

Scrolling through her phone
paying no attention.
“That’s great honey.”

“Look mommy, look!”

The wife returns
and we are on
our way.
 
The Sherlock Holmes of Daytime TV

A real whodunit?
No need for Watson.

Twenty-six paternity tests
with the results on live television
and no one is the father.

And you think:
damn girl, who much honey
does one queen need?
 
And the way they always run offstage
embarrassed
as though going on television
knowing 26 different men could
have been the father was not
bad enough.




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, RASPUTIN, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Song Is.

Jason Ryberg Broken Down With Miley Cyrus National Enquirers, Amish Gangsters, And What They All Say...

1) Loaded Dice and Poisoned Candy 


Hardly even know it’s there
most of the time...

after all, we can be a (somewhat)
fundamentally oblivious species:

whether posited, serenely, in proper lotus position
in the middle of some shimmeringly pristine
mountaintop scenario or deeply steeped
in some sweaty, chaotic configuration of love,

or (just as likely), broke down
on the side of the highway,
I-35 let’s say, just south of Topeka, Kansas
(with five pallets of National Enquirers,
bearing the tear-streaked face of Miley Cyrus,
that has GOT to get through):

a weathered cargo ship
run aground under a brutal, relentless sun,
one-o-one in the shade
and a beer can rolling along all of a sudden
like a tumbleweed in an old cowboy movie,
(and now a dog barking off in the distance,
as if on cue).

So, we are allowed, now and then,
an absolution, of sorts,
from our inherent obligation
to fundamental attentiveness
to most of the obvious         
and at least some of the finer points
of the subtext, metatext and copious footnotes
to the post, post-modernist novel of Life.

But, still it hovers and circles,
always lurking just out of the corner of the eye,
waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike,
doling out fate and fortune,
good, bad and indifferent, alike,

the free-floating nucleus
of the all-encompassing,
all-permeating physics of context,
the fluid matrical mechanica
of how things really are,
the constantly shifting locus
of the very shit that happens to us,
again and again and again
in sloppy viscous loops...

The moment ultimately coming to a point,
like the point of a big red arrow
on the Metaphysical Highway
Rest Stop Map Of Life,

like the finger of God pointing,
just a little too accusingly,
at you (and you and you)
as if to say

YOU ARE HERE
(and here you are)!
Hell,
everything else
is extenuating circumstances
and low-grade
accommodation,

loaded dice and poisoned candy.



2) Ironic, Aint It?


that,
              while constantly
                                               being re-reminded
        by the representatives
                                                   of forces
(presumably)

                          larger than ourselves,
from time to time
                                to time, of one’s (seemingly

               pre-ordained and inescapable)
                                                  holding place
in whatever
                           grand (or even less than
             grand) schemata of peoples /
                                                   places / things
                      you happen to currently find yourself
steeped in,
                   is indeed sobering,
                                             it also,
                                   (maybe not-so) oddly enough,
                         in turn, makes the notion

      of pulling several monster
                                                  rippers off a bong
made from a google-eyed
                                             porcelain bunny and
                 sipping on a quadruple
                                                        Americano
           while flipping
                                      back and forth between
      a (sur)reality show about
                                               Amish gangsters and
bat-shit religious programming
                                         on the local access channel,
                   sound like just as good
                                                            a way as any
                                                                           to start the day.


3) They Say A Lot, Don’t They?


They say fools look for wisdom
stamped on candy Valentine hearts
and go for long strolls
where angels bury their dead.

They say the only difference
between an angel and a demon
is the mood you catch them in.

They say rude awakenings
come to those who nod off
waiting for phones to ring.

They say women who run with wolves
often get bit on the butt.

They say men who somehow manage
to mount a tiger will only begin to fathom
the true depth of their foolishness
when they have to take a leak.

They say those who sleep under bridges
become birds in their dreams.

They say a bird in the frying pan
is worth more than big talk
from a burning bush.

They say God may not play at dice
but He? / She? / It? has been rumored
to give the old cosmic roulette wheel a spin
from time to time.

They say where God builds a megachurch
the Devil builds a fireworks / BBQ / porn emporium.

They say conspiracy is the only true religion
(in which all other religions merely play
their assigned roles).

They say he who seeks vengeance
makes two grave mistakes.

They say desires never satisfied,
ambitions thwarted, needs never met
can cause the blood to cool and the soul
to pool and blacken like grease in a trap.

They say money may be
the root of all evil
but pussy is the fruit.

      They say a lot, don’t they?

They certainly do.

They certainly do.






Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve books of poetry,
six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders,
notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be 
(loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry 
letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. 
He is currently an artist-in-residence at both 
The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s 
and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor 
and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collections of poems 
are Zeus-X-Mechanica (Spartan Press, 2017) 
and A Secret History of the Nighttime World (39 West Press, 2017). 
He lives part-time in Kansas City with a rooster named Little Red 
and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere 
in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also 
many strange and wonderful woodland critters.