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.
Katherine LaLima
Chicken Dinner
Nobody speaks out of turn,
allowing an eye to cut
a breath be taken then
genuine pause without charity.
The sullen age in silence
and when where those who still sing find rest
becomes a bed between twelve tires and the chapfallen
Nobody wins this fight.
The Last Stair
I don’t think about you
until I have to descend outdoors
and even then it is a mere few seconds
out of my day I regard every visit as potentially the time
it all finally goes wrong and I, for one reason or another, never walk again.
Part of me begs that time to come but a larger portion of me is afraid.
I grasp the outside wood of the house instead of the banisters which I cannot unsee as unseemly
because the first time she saw them my mother refused to touch them; I feel
myself pulling wood planks slowly from their frame, my
left knee locks and I always fall from
the last stair.
Katherine LaLima is a writer and book cover designer. She has been published at the University of South Carolina and in Jasper magazine. Through iniatves of SC's Poetry Laureate and community
organizations, she has written short poetry for college students and local hospital visitors as well as
haiku which were hung on city buses in Columbia. Despite progression of Multiple Sclerosis she has also
written hundreds of haiku regarding neuroscience, astronomy, politics and quantum physics (availabe on
Twitter @neurodegenerate, book cover designs @LaLimaDesign). It is also fun to know that Katherine's
wife's name is Catherine.