By Ryan Quinn Flanagan
BLUE AND WHITE NAUTICAL PATTERN
The morning light arrives sudden as a chambermaid
upon my door, knocks lightly begging intrusion, twin straps
of twisted suspenders coiled around an elevated hook,
and across the floor a carpet to warm the feet in curled gesture,
swearing by its blue and white nautical pattern that
makes you think of the sea when you are nowhere near
the sequestering salt, the old-time fisherman at their cages
and manning the boning stations at the end of the pier.
I am balled up under covers many miles away, smacking mouth
of dehydration, quizzical morning breath and prying fingers gingerly
pulling sleep from the corners of early eyes. When I roll over,
a veritable avalanche of: skin, bone, cartilage tumble with me –
and yes, muscle even though the newly awakened untensed
loosey-goosy can hardly feel it, that charmless escape of such things
before I am again fossil-still; the womb of the mattress carrying my
thoughtless weight. Between sleep and wake – magician and mime.
A slack-jawed float of apparitional silences.
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 Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
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