Welcome to Labrys, your student-run art and literature collective of Smith College.

Evoke within me, dear rotten pears
melting in the bowl with the fruit fly eggs,
a sense of what it means to decay with pungence.

Pear, you were made to decompose,
Yet your mother flowered and fruited
and shipped you off to a fate of thirty-two teeth.
You were supposed be eaten just when ripe.

I don’t want to think of what my friend said,
her headphones in, bra off,
eyelids bruised purple by clock’s hands.
She drank her second cup of coffee,
sputtered out three more lines of her
fourth essay that night,
and said she probably won’t live past fifty.

I want to think of you,
your blackened spots and peeling skin
oozing out juice that makes the Dole sticker curl up.
How everyone expected you to go early.
How you aged perfectly
to rot in spite of it all.