Assembled by Ryan P. Kinney
From works by Gabriella Ercolani, Dr. Benjamin Anthony, Heather Munn, Vicki Acquah, Tanya Pilumeli
Additional original content by Ryan P. Kinney

Bewildered is the conscience of a dancer
whose unified self wishes to remain true
to a lover,
to family,
a social circle.
Yet a facet of the face must make love
to the masses;
each hungry audience that idolizes the mask,
she slowly exposes.

Then he saw the little movements where her belly was and now were taut muscles barely holding back guts and little faces with eyes shut snakes tiny tongues clicking, tails wrapping around

Atlantic waves
Soothing
Tsunami crashes; my mental health strews memory about like road sand.

A child asks for two dollars
To help me from his heart-
My maintenance software
Opens to error messages-
"Man pushes glasses up
On his nose-incidentally";

Resistance subdued
Take her then
Junk in the corner
She's worthless to me

This is no kindness in this man.
He is gluttony incarnate.
Consumption just to flaunt his aristocracy to the peasant.

You enter the world empty-handed and you will leave it empty-handed.

Assembled by Eli Williams
From quotes taken from works at poetry readings by Vladimir Swirynsky, Bob Olsen, Ray McNiece, Kathleen Gallagher, Joe Roarty, Eva Barrett, Russ Vidrick, Tam Polzer, Rosemarie Iwasa, Dianne Boresnik
Additional original content by Ryan P Kinney

I watched you undress like a stranger lost in a great city of hope
The problem of loving the same woman in different ways
And still love once more
This is my word in any language
So I cozy myself up to a murderer
So I can taste the infernal darkness
Too much white space, unpunctuated
No place for the demon to go, but further in
I'm a monster, I admit it
God not only loves a sinner, he prefers them
How long will I be playing to get by
Is it worse to be the one taken or the one left behind
Nothing is ever born again here

Assembled by Eli Williams
From works by Eli Williams, Josh Romig, Lennart Lundh
Additional content from “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths

Want to see life
Take me out tonight
For a moment
Take me anywhere, I don’t care
I can’t seem to make
My heartbeat slow down
If time is liquid, like the oceans
Take me out tonight
Not much traffic on this path anymore
In my rearview mirror
And in the darkened underpass
I watch the boy
No longer even special
If I could go where they’re going
Where there’s music and there’s people
I don’t care, I don’t care
Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I don’t care

Assembled by Ryan P. Kinney
From quotes taken from works at poetry readings by Bronte Billings, Josh Romig, Micheal Billings, Jack McGuane, Elise Panehal, Rosemarie Iwasa, Adam Brodsky
Additional original content by Ryan P. Kinney

Being broken makes the girl do something good
She loves the challenge of impossible tasks
Detachment comes easier to a drunk
The lostness of the found, the blindness of the seeing, the spirituality of the atheist, the silence of the spoken
She doesn't matter
Nothing she creates matters
Nothing matters
The nothing is electric…
You are caterpillar now
One day you will be a beautiful butterfly
Her stark lines are completely naked now
Humans are also stardust
Which means we are golden

by Dawn Richardson and Tiffany Ann Boyd

Assembled from works by J.M. Romig, Sheena Zilla, and Ryan P. Kinney

My first memory is of dying.
I felt like I’d lived a full life
And now I was gladly fading away.
My first last words were
“Tell Elizabeth I love her”
I don’t remember knowing Elizabeth.
I love her though, or at least I did in that moment.

“These aren’t sad tears I’m crying, I’m just cutting onions my dear.”
It makes me want to rip off my flesh and run down the street as bare muscle and bone screaming ****** ******.
It will get better once I leave this purgatory waiting room of stress and self-loathing, but until then my outlook is a bit glum.

I am terrified
Before me is a discolored, screaming, clawing, misshapen alien creature
My son takes his first breathes of real air
We are all exhausted
His mother looks at me with a look that practically screams,
“We did it.”
I plead, “But we’re not done doing it yet…
Are we?”
His gurgles turn into cries
And I know…

For some reason, couldn’t tell you why, I thought about Frankenstein’s Monster.

Some parts are really fuzzy,
I hold it close to me- the fuzzy parts against my skin.
It’s a quilt blanket, stitched together of pieces and parts of found cloth.
My father made it for me.
My very last birthday gift.
I cocoon myself in it like a womb.

I hated him for what he’d done, but I hated myself more for missing him.
I have to fight everyday to be a better person in spite of what I was exposed to.

Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions

by Ryan P. Kinney and Aaron Shinkle
With additional content assembled from Eli Williams and Lennart Lundh

The fall of man

It was the end of monsters
The end of mothers
The end of haters
Of lovers
Of pain and suffering
Of bliss and ecstasy

Nothing to hide under the bed
No terror floating in your head
Just the buzzing and swarming of insects

There was just the animalistic need to survive
And Gaia had decided
It was best for her survival
If we did not

Truth be told
We did it to ourselves

Some future digger after truth,
alien or human, kneeling with
trowel and brush at this grave,
will note in clear, careful script
the wonder that a people would
be so deliberate with the smallest
of their gods' creatures,
and so careless of themselves.

One never sees the monster
Hiding in the open
No one ever suspects that we are hiding something
When they are staring it in the face

We walked upon the new Earth
Like we did on the Old
Tugging along our gravel hearts
On broken asphalt
Our eyes slowly
Moving towards the new sky
The clouds, like curtains, unfolded
Our feet freshly cleansed of old
Traditions and assumptions that we
would never make it to this moment
But no one knew what was past
That port of no return
The ship sailed away,
Faded out of view

Another layer chipped away like
Hardened clay
The people here aspire to be
Nothing more than alive
The lives of the New World
In the hands of strangers
Coexisting within each other
For fear of never existing again
This is their lifeline, their blood
They are all in this repopulation
Together

we see others as they are
we see ourselves at every age
and all at once
supplicants, praying for tomorrow.
Everything from nothing.
And to nothing we return.
To the whole of the way,
We hastened our downfall through an illusion of control.
Only through letting this run its course
And stepping to the center could we hope for survival

The lights one by one dim
The music softens
The actors bow,
We close the curtain on this world

by Ryan P. Kinney and J.M. Romig

The coy house thinks, “Should I let this man enter me?”
Although she pretends to resist at first
She soon relents,
The pressure giving way and her door granting passage

He pledges to give her hardwood floors
To put a swingset in her backyard
The finest dressings on her windows
Painting her face,
Decking her out
To show the world how much he loves her
Softly wooing, he promises her a family

She hopes this one will make good
As he begins his work,
She watches the swell in his young wife’s womb
And for a while, believes in life again

For the first time in years,
She breathes fresh air as they move in their boxes
The melding of their past and her future
An image so bright,
That she is almost blinded by the light
When one night,
The soon-to-be mother misses her first step

At the bottom of the stairs,
He finds his world in pieces
As the paramedics pack the body and cart it away
The door closes behind them
And the air grows stagnant

The only boxes he ever unpacks,
Contain spirits
To numb him from the haunting emptiness inside
The past becomes nothing, but a foot stool
Slowly crushed and deformed under his weight
Her rooms,
Built to house new memories, home cooked meals, and laughter
Now nothing, but
Stale beer, chips, and wasted life


Created from prompts at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions