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

A new kind of needlework: in this,
the needle goes in once, and lives
inside. In this work too, art exists
and inexactness wastes existence.

Long before Christ they called her
the goddess of small animals.
By moonlight they knew her in the midnight lab:
by her bow they never felt the pain.
Wires for thread now, stained imperially
dark, drawn down the length like a breath:
cells arborizing like Featherstitch
beneath a blossom of ink.

And sometimes, by accident,
the one you never understood,
the French Knot, ossifying in jelly;
a fève in the sweet new year of you.

Your breathing canvas sleeps
in a loom of metal, soft-furred;
shuttle entering its gray and white
and soft, soft tapestries.

These tonight are yours, you who can thread a needle
and sketch windows in little skulls:
all this with hands as white as latex,
your feminine arts.