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

A girl standing next to me feeds the box quarters,
silver clinking against a metal tongue and throat.
She presses the pad,
a nuclear sound bounces
off the cinderblock walls of the laundry room.
Water fills the machine, slowly drowning
the taffetas and silks.

A laugh – “I forgot to put in the detergent;
I’ve never done this before.”
I offer her a smile, a bent wrist
showing which bottle empties into which cavity,
how the jewels in her blouse need to dry on racks,
about how diamonds demand light and fresh air.

I wonder what wet velvet feels like against pewter,
if it still feels just as rich
as porcelain.

I watch the machine swirl and move back and forth,
sometimes here, sometimes there.
It twists my face, my nose
and eyelashes pulled and tugged at.
I think of the fluorescent light bulb mornings and nights,
when the girl next to me was asleep,
when my mother bent over a bag, counting our socks and underwear.
I heard the buzz of the bulbs, the hiss of steam outside
like a liquid locomotive.
I sat under a palm tree,
faux, watching the machines and handing my mother cups and soap,
her third or fourth coffee.
Her short curls damp and tangling themselves in the thick air
––I see her turns in the glass machine:
one cup soap, one cup bleach––a nuclear formula.
The glass machine too fragile to stop midway.
I think of those untouchable-hours and of the cart she pushed over city blocks.
The clock chiming with every bang of metal against cement stair.

The nuclear clock ticks and tocks.
I take my laundry, warm and round like a newborn,
and walk back up the stairs, each stair a creak
under the weight that I carry.