What’s In Your Coffee? (for Brian Fugett)
The Ohio River
is bursting at the banks.
Joe Burrow
hits a streaking barn burner
across the middle.
I pass this woman
drinking in a parking lot,
dressing down a happy face
painted on a building
across the street.
And the question arises,
as if from the cackling ether:
what’s in your coffee?
Surely,
the catnip armies
must know.
Tiny heads
like sleeping samurais.
The surest sign
of a life well-lived.
For I am rich
in the right things.
And in the wrong things
never poor.
Burning Cherries
Crusts slammed together, could have been an earthquake or toast.
Could have been cars turned on the head of a pin,
Could have been Johnny Cash pickers, and those shoelaces
you neglect each time you’re out to grab the garbage can.
And those burning cherries, ashing in the wind.
Fixing tracers like blood azaleas.
Could have been to someone’s favourite song,
I watched them pretend to dance.
I watched them fall in love.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Red Fez, Evergreen Review, The Literary Underground, Horror Sleaze Trash, Rusty Truck, Zygote in my Coffee, and The Oklahoma Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.
