Live Nude Poems

Heavy Rotation I see this fat kid get on the Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair in a spinning tea cup all by himself and the weight of him sitting down bounces his cup noticeably so that the kids in the other cups all snicker and point.                                   Even the ride operator laughs. I feel bad for the kid. As the ride starts up, the gears grind and everyone looks accusingly at the fat kid. And soon they are spinning and screaming with arms in the air. I watch the fat kid go around a few times. Blank-faced as though he doesn’t know he is there. 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 ...

Snowlining   At the same height of             Every rocky mountain        Above all seasonal change You are widely cut open As if to bite a whole patch of       Sky from heaven With rows of rows of Whale-like teeth Yuan Changming , nine-time Pushcart and one-time Best of Net nominee, published monographs on translation before moving out of China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits  Poetry Pacific  with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include  Best of Best Canadian Poetry  (2008-17) , BestNewPoems Online, Threepenny Review  and 1319 others.  

The Bedside Book of Cryptids     I was rehearsing what I would say.             I had lined up some cocktail toothpicks. It was one of those days that makes us             believe in Bigfoot,             the sky more shadow             than a maker of shadows. We all need a little downtime.             To be that which we’ve marked             our trails by.             To speak like a Viking.             To smolder. Most smoke and all spoken word          ...

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.