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

After Muriel Rukeyser

Speak to me. Take my hand. Am I smiling now?
What I know is a past in the heart of China:
a city as raw as my then anesthetic-sodden veins.
Smog under a grey sky that kept bringing our ceilings closer.
Pregnant air that pulsed with sweat at our temples.
Escape in chaos.
When our speech never made it—
dropped dead halfway through morning fog
like construction workers from high-rises.
It was all we knew.

Our fingers have been dead to each other since then.
Still,
I never cease to dream—
I create reveries of replacement.

I dream of a clean river where 女娲 isn’t lonely.
There is cave a thousand 里 away,
where our hands know proximity,
where in the dark,
we felt both ourselves and each other,
where water still fell from above
so we could be all new,
always,

and you never had to save me.

Still, hear me, I am smiling now.
I am still here.
Take my hand. Speak to me.