The Mona Lisa is a Real Piece of Work by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

The Mona Lisa is a Real Piece of Work

Such a large hoopla for such a small rendering
which smacks of good marketing and questionable taste,
you come to me with religion and I ask about my Baudelaire;
any man who can hate the rest of humanity more than himself 
is an exporter in the truest sense of the word,
a shipper’s manifest mind with a shipping crate heart lost at sea
and that Mona Lisa is a real piece of work,
that curt fender bender smirk of lost knowing  
so that you just want to be in on the hustle with the insurance companies,
trade information and maybe land those digits   
even though you never call which drives women CRAZY –
not the one hanging in the Louvre, with that most masculine
of brows; stare all you like, she’s not betraying one iota 
of her mysteries to you or anyone else

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, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review. 

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