Guidance Systems, like Guidance Counsellors with Teeth. By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Who the hell cares about magnetic north at fourteen?

I drank alone in the basement while my mother was dying.

My father had priorities and his liquor cabinet was the least of them.

As long as I fed and clothed my brother and sent him to school.

My father would call every few days and I would keep cooking 

Spaghetti-Os with toast.

It was around then that the guidance counsellor began to fake an interest.

I could turn on the television and see missiles launched from ships.

Guidance systems, like guidance counsellors with teeth.

Someone actually doing something.

There was a body count and lifeless results.

My father kept calling to tell me my mother was 

not among the dead.

Then I would put my brother to bed

and start drinking in the basement.

That bubbling warm feeling that would numb the face.

It was the best I had ever felt in almost a decade 

and a half of living.

I fell in love right there.

The bottle would never leave me.

On that ratty old couch from the 1970s

with racing stripes all up the cushions.

A child becomes a man in the dark.

You almost miss it if you’re not looking.

The window cracked just enough that you 

could probably hear something dying

from the street.

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,The Rye Whiskey Review, Outlaw Poetry Network, Under The Bleachers, The Dope Fiend Daily and In Between Hangovers.