The Abstract Art Gallery
A writing gallery created by writers from around the world. From poetry to song lyrics, from essays to entire novels and short stories.
It is a piece of satire
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1. Declarative Sentences
…cat carries an unknown blue rag around in her mouth and throws it into a bowl of fresh milk. She likes taking and flaunting objects on walks around the house and yard. She eats her food by taking it out of the bowl with her paw, and putting it either on my unimpressed foot or on the innocent carpet. The good thing perhaps is that she gifts me…
By Ndaba Sibanda
Read MoreUrge to Rome
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…stood in the kitchen with the five other mothers of the settima classe—the seventh grade. Curious to visit an Italian home since our arrival in Rome, here I finally was, one of le ragazze, the girls. There was nothing exotic about the room: modern counters, appliances, wall phone with an extra-long cord. A window looked onto a back yard where a yapping collie blend wrestled with a pink rubber ball. I could have been in New York. Ohio. Anywhere in America. Only the clouds of cigarette smoke, the undecipherable staccato banter and the Moka pot on…
By Kyra Robinov
Four Haiku inspired by the painting "The Singing Butler" by Jack Vittrian
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…hand on my back
Squish of sand between my toes
Best night of my life
My old summer hat
Shields me from rain and privilege
My arm is…
By Staci B
In a world of turmoil, it is art that endures...
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…the ruins
Of empires gone
Tumbled bricks
And empty rooms
We do not cheer
Their battles…
By Mike Turner
Read MoreBasketball playing Werewolf in Iowa??
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…people of Dew, Iowa, had long known about the town werewolf. No one knew for sure who she or he was in human form. On full moon nights the wolf could be heard crying out from the corn fields. The next morning some poor bleeting or mooing animal would be found mostly eaten. The local sheriff would look for the remains by the carrion birds circling in the sky.
None of this was known to a road-trip weary traveller by the name of Ginger and her cat, Thelma. They had been traveling down the…
By Alex Almeida
This piece was written in frustration at the ways in which many people, including significantly, those in my workplace, treat suicide and grief.
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…many words are said. So many tears are shed. Relentless rumours beat their dark wings – an unkindness of ravens. Speculation, stage-whispered behind closed doors and thin office walls is painful. Platitudes stick in the throat. They peck at the bereaved. Workplace groups batten down in reproach. The grieving are unfriended, deleted. Work becomes a battleground; a fight to be heard; to still do one’s job with the squeeze of grief shaping a new…
By Lynda Scott Araya
Read MoreReflection of an earlier time, in fiction form.
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…Whitworth had not failed in life. He’d retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a brigadier general (although he’d only been given the rank as a retirement sendoff gift, and never really served holding the rank at all). Retirement pay was not that significant when it came to supporting his wife, repaying educational loans for his children and dealing with the real costs of owning a home on Wing Point. Whitworth needed a job. He’d found a job as part of a local crew fishing the Sound, but the skipper…
By James Strauss
Read More…had been to Clayton, New Mexico many times by car and stayed at the Eklund hotel often. This time, perhaps his last, he came on the train from Tucumcari.
They met because they had been the sole occupants of the passenger car on the train other than two women conversing in German in the front seats. The old man and young girl were now the only customers for breakfast in the dining room of the Eklund Hotel in Clayton, New Mexico. According to the frost-encrusted thermometer just outside the window, it was fourteen degrees and howling wind pushed swirls of…
By John Green
Read MoreDreams and ghosts. Memories and midnight. Was I lonely or alone?
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…cheap night.
It was always the same thing. A dirty street, across from a muddy park, down from a polluted river.
She would sit on the bench at the transit stop with her brown bag poison. Sometimes she would hold it up to the sky, as an offering; sometimes she would just drink it.
After a few choked back slugs she would begin to sing. A throat warble, really, but she tried.
Songs about heaven and songs about horses.
One night as I was watching her party for one…
By Shauna Woodbury
How do we percieve the unknown when it walks before us? And how far do we reach out to it? (The introduction to a work in progress)
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…didn't know him.
I think that's what stuck out to me the most, more than the mane of dark hair that fell around his shoulders, more than the tall boots, or the careworn jacket of black leather, or the chains that criss-crossed its lapel. These things certainly stood out to most people who passed him, surely, so prominent against the muted background of the church pew. But the fact that I had no…
By Matteo Polk
