Live Nude Poems

Factory Stacks driving into Sudbury from the West the scars of man spill over a billowing drug buy sky rock that has been there for tens of thousands of years blown away in an instant for a new double lane highway and they bury the slag so you never see it, the grass an unnatural green after a couple of years so there are jobs and quotas and things can go on like before the hitchhiker along the side of the road thumbing his way to house parties where things go missing. 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, Rusty Truck, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez , and The Oklahoma Review .

Hunting Dinosaurs With A Needle In My Arm I smoke roses to get high And I get drunk on sun tea in the morning I fix my arm tattoos with sharpie markers And I collect artwork depicting bull fights My joints ache as a side effect from Medication for hypertension My muscles ache as a side effect from Back breaking, physical toil I am fifty one years old And I make twenty seven thousand Dollars a year I don’t believe in heaven I do believe in vodka I did quite well in college But I struggle in life I never, ever confuse One with the other I know that youth is privileged And forgiving I know that middle age Is not I no longer sleep on my mother’s couch If you do I kindly invite you To go fuck yourself Time and endurance earn the right To judge and so I judge If life is pass/ fail Then everything leans on Who reads the work The...

a dmire those long legs   whispers in the haze   not all these places give a shit about a smoking ban   another round of something evil for the classy lady effectively using her cleavage to her advantage   grab a chair and admire those long legs   and come to terms with that bulge between her legs in the morning   there's no time for questions of morality when the liquor tastes ...

a boy just broke my 18 yr old daughters heart for the first time she says she’s afraid she will never sleep again and I hear her cry in the next room until sleep finally comes in the end it’s me who is up all night thinking about all the plastic horses and Barbie dolls I fixed over the years all the jewelry I untangled back when you believed my love and patience and glue could fix everything. (For Hannah) Matthew Borczon is a poet and navy sailor from Erie, pa. He has published four books of poetry; A Clock of Human Bones through Yellow Chair Review Press, Battle lines through Epic Rights, Ghost Train through Weasel Press and, new this month, Sleepless nights and Ghost soldiers through Grey Boarders press. He publishes widely in the small press. When he is not writing, he's raising four children with his wife of 20 years.

That night anything could have happened. It’s not often that you hear the blast of explosives in a place where children are sleeping. Either a bomb was planted or someone blew himself up. The cops are at the door right now looking for him. People should be concerned over what will disappear next. It’s like you’ve lost your car keys at night in your backyard and you’re searching for them through a toilet paper roll with a flashlight. * br> The open eye is very human. I saw swarms of people running away and my first reaction was “gun,” so I ran, too. The important thing was to go into another world. I would be a lot less afraid if I just knew what it was called. The scariest are the ones that stop right behind your heart. * Buildings are always crime scenes. The dress code is trench coats and fedoras. I heard him load his gun. And then I saw his gun was black. I’m going to leave flowers at the place where it happened. There was blood everywhere, and a sound like flies buzzin...

Living without gps Travel up the common femoral artery to the junction of walk and don't walk. Leave latitude for the heart, its sextant lost in the remains of route 66, or plot a solution; I've got my spine I've got my Orange crush . Broken mirrors vivisect the man, all roads lead to Polaris, scattered bearings.   Find some other track side noodling in the dark, people losing time, lost being lost between the Crux and nebulas. Steer into the long way home, find where found is hidden in the magnetic resonance, images of small intestine and appendix, the parallax of travel where no one can run to, or from. Richard Merrill is an unrealized poet. As well as an unrealized farmer, architect, Lego artist, and ultracyclist. It took him a while to accept the term; trucker. Lately he has realized he is very much that. He hopes the reader finds some merit in his work.

I’m calling you out. You’re a dream but never a reality. You’re everywhere on the streets and in my sheets. I work all day and catch the Colfax bus home at night. You’re everywhere on the bus; your smells, your faces, your rage. There is a woman twitching in her seat from withdrawals. I’m too scared to sit next to her. I see the face of the man who tried to kill me every day in my son’s face. How can I love this boy with all my heart when he looks like the one person I hate the most? I can’t wake up. I can’t move. The psychiatrist tells me it’s sleep paralysis but I think it’s you. I can solve Algebra equations in my dreams but I can’t figure out how to live off $2300 bucks a month with three jobs and a son to raise. Soon he will lose his Medicaid because of a man who cares more about the size of his hands than the size of his heart. There’s no equati...