Ana Hein is an undergraduate student at Emerson College pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing with minors in Comedy Writing and Performance and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been featured in Concrete, Gauge, Emerson College’s Undergraduate Students for Publishing blog, Black Swan, and the Appley 2018 Rising Stars Collection and has won multiple Editor’s Choice Awards from Teen Ink Magazine. She can usually be found buying too many books, singing loudly, wearing red lipstick, complaining about the weather, staring into the void, and generally being very dramatic.
Judith Lloyd
Frequency Translator
Pacified in the winking
of broadcast towers
I forget it's all terrible
and everything is my fault.
Somewhere someone
is winding a thread
around their index finger
for no good reason.
Somewhere someone
asked against her better
judgment: and as his gaze
degrades to synthesis,
their exchange to a theory
of exchange, she regards
his plastic opacity and wonders
why she never took ballet.
Somewhere, someone
forgot. Just for a moment,
just long enough to remember
some other question,
some other itching under
the skin. Perhaps it's enough
to remember: we're always
somebody forgetting
something. To collect or
to grasp, to appreciate
or maintain. It lives
in the periphery, brushing
the fine hairs or tearing
into the lower lip. It's
always just out of the
corner of our eye. Or
it isn't. There and gone,
no primary function to the blink,
just a psychic placation
in the place where thought
transitions to message.
Hear me out: we are all
blinking, there in one moment,
there in one moment, there
in one moment, and then
Judith Lloyd is a Baltimore-based artist, writer, and monologist. Her publications include Read It Back (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and All of a sudden our bodies are objects (Zoetic Press, 2019). She's contributed to Nonbinary Review, 100 Word Story and Unbroken.