Vienna Cento

A wild patience has taken me this far 
The world is not sane 
333 quails fly over 333 roofs
I saw Death standing in a front yard in Wachau
He lost his nose in a duel over mathematics
Guilty. What now?
Eve, the mother of all life on earth, stands before us, locked in her own inner world.
Landscape of the soul
Kafkaesk
The eyes of a man…stare blankly into a void.
Happy is he, who forgets.
What cannot be said in our day must be sung.
There is a butterfly on the monolith – I think it is dead.

discard the brambles

let the roots come bursting from the forearms
traveling down a membranous vein like semi trucks
down a six lane highway in the
                                                                  middle of Texas
skin so hot it’s boiling
                                          roots tearing                             flesh without violence
looking for tenderness and coming away with a mouth that tastes like a pile of dead leaves.
Discard the brambles in hopes it’ll bear fruit but
                                                                                            prune                 prune
                                                                                                         prune                 
until your wrist is the stump and the roots forms branches,
                                                form leaves,
                           form hollow,
Baptize yourself in fire; let the water
pour from your eyes until headlights look like                          angels halos
and God comes crawling back to you with His tail between His legs.

Vignettes

My life is faded and sweatstained like my bed sheets or
the shirt that clings
to your underarms – something pathetic and devout.
If only I could walk the rest of my life in the mouth of a spider:
a million eyes and barbed wire for hands
my desire contagious, my life a montage of me sitting in empty cafes
drinking coffee staring at a blank wall in sepia hues
then looking out the window in my underwear at the streetlamps below
Motionless, Monstrous.
Then you are there,
and the world is bathed in magenta and orange and I can feel the sun in a way I didn’t know I could.

I’m nothing but a comic strip of a person.
Watch me leap from one page to the next and the only thing that changes
Is the furrow between my brows.
I’ll stare down at the neon-glazed streets
letting the noir death tones infect
my weary limbs,
and illuminate my countenance in a way both ghostly
and magnetic.
The beats counting down now, the piano faltering
come lay with me in the white strips between the pictures
my corrugated skin and hand drawn eyes gazing out
between the sheets like a voyeur.
Find home in the book’s narrow binding and white blank
pages. I’ll only stay if you feed me

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Abigail Ray is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She has been published in Fruitslice, Maudlin House, and Same Faces Collective, among others. She has her BS in English and Writing, and primarily writes poetry, personal essays, and fiction. She is an aspiring lighthouse keeper.