Alonwyn Clauser
Often Through Doors
Labrys Art and Literature
Labrys was founded in 2001 by Tammis Day, Margot Atwell, and Rose Ellen Epstein. It is currently Smith’s only student-run publication of art and creative writing. Our mission is to share uncensored work produced by our students with the greater community.
Letter from the Editor
To create is to notice the world where it has been unnoticed. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote in her notebooks that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” To follow this line of thinking, a community’s artists and writers are its most devout. Each time we make art, we ask ourselves: what have you seen? How will you bring others to see it? There is a sort of magic in the witnessing.
This year’s edition of Labrys is made up of your rich and compassionate attention. Photographs by Chengsheng Wu capture instants from flurries of activity, while paintings by Raegan Thomas and Ratnasari R. Lusiaga reveal careful studies of a face. Sometimes attention is tension––in Traci Williams' “Mall Muse”, a woman feels the scrutiny and severity of the white gaze. In other pieces, attention is the utmost form of care: it witnesses, heals, produces. In the poem “Artemis' Lesionwork”, a goddess forms the bodies of small animals with the deft focus of a surgeon. “Art exists,” Emma Cairns Watson writes in the first stanza, “and inexactness wastes existence”.
In Labrys XV, no existence will be wasted. Thank you to each submitter for trusting us with your creations. Thank you to Mayrose Beatty, Zoe Dong, and Adela Goldsmith for helping me to edit this collection. Thank you to each reader, for your attention. It is a gift to share this work with you.
Julia Falkner '19
a r t w o r k
Gráinne Buchanan
of a better life
Echo Zhang
<a lot of eyes, a lot of us>
Anna Zhou
Vines
Chengsheng Wu
Easter Sunday
Alonwyn Clauser
Panic
Ratnasari R Lusiaga
The Libyan Sibyl from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel
Jessica Innis
More Than Black Pain
Zoe Dong
Mock Orange
Lucille Ausman
Holy Cow
Ava Goga
Promethea
Raegan Thomas
Primarily Me
Anna Zhou
Monster
Chengsheng Wu
Untitled
w r i t i n g
There's no good euphemism for Sudden Death
We were all anxiously perched on eighteen’s cusp. / Summer burnt us intimately, it’s too close to the face.
Mall Muse
Dollars do not disguise my Black / do not hide my Black / don’t even minimize my Black
Onions
Mom comes into the theatre, pulls me out like a kernel in a tooth. I do not finish the movie. On the ride home, the car is silent.
Substance
I watch my family members pour it into anything that feels empty––glass or mouth...
Artemis' Lesionwork
Your breathing canvas sleeps / in a loom of metal, soft-furred; / shuttle entering its gray and white / and soft, soft tapestries.
Morning coffee
Mommy grows cilantro in her window box / In this chipped seaweed painted house, / A matchbox of a house, / And Mommy burns herself with the oil popping / In the pot.
Summers in Umbria
Wind combs back the field, revealing a lightened underbelly of grass, and he watches the green fall away beneath his outstretched hands. He parts the field as if opening a jaded lake.
birth name
i will name her Air, and Honeysuckle, and Fallen Needles In The Pine Grove.
Breaking Rules
I enjoy dark meat. I am what I eat. I like black coffee and Southern Sweet tea. True to the rules of the game.
Prism Sonnet No. 2
You: precious diagram of / nerves, figure weaved from / bite and boil. Grief was an / orchard you walked through.
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