About Me
- welcome to the labcat
- the labcat is the online life of labrys, smith college's art/literary magazine. we collect poems, prose, flash-fiction, letters, diary entries, essays, doodles, paintings, oils, sketches, photography, animation, videos, graphics, chicken-scratches, stippling, charcoal rubbing, pastels, collages, observations, music and whatever else inspires you. send it in bulky bundles to labrys@smith.edu.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
A Poet by Sarah Collins Honenberger '74
You put your head in the oven. Because Ted left you? I don’t think so. I’ve read the bee poems. I’ve read your novel. You tried once before when you were too young to know what it was—or even guess—but you came back. Suicide was just another idea, hyperbole of life and death, fascinating and frightening. An exam you failed the first time. So you sat and spun the words and ideas into poems, threads of hope and hate. And then you put down the pen, turned on the gas, and rested your cheek against the cool metal and closed your eyes. The emotion melted away, pooled into puddles—pure into alloy—and then welded flesh and untouchable gas, a monument to what was, a substitution for what might have been. You never meant to give it up for nothing known or dear.
Nicholas cried out in the night, Mama, while Frieda worried tears to threadbare skin. And Ted wept, thinking he had done it to himself. Or perhaps not able to stop himself, rejoiced to think he was the ultimate tutor then, the mentor and the pupil merged, control that had escaped him with your pulsing heart and brain. And again now and now and now he pushes the lines across the page, hidden in the dark hole, enemy of the red bursts that split a body bold. The river washes by him, prostitute poet, flotsam on the flooded shore.
Remembering the crowded sidewalks, pram caught on the curb, and blackened letters in your hand, he struggles to forget. Instead he writes it down, the birthday letters, before he remembers he no longer has you to type it out on a clean page and to send it out into the world, a pirate ship of starless greed. He blots out sharp phrases from your journals, lies down in still waters, and genuflects to his own image reflected there. The thought-fox warily sets lame prints in snow, colder and deeper in the darkness than Ted’s nightmares or the weeping children’s waking dreams. The eye widens, coming about its own business, and he thinks he touches again the melting fingers and your smile. Blinded, he writes and lies and sells them wholesale, the gold pieces heavy on his heart. Your story, just a story, he says. Yet he knows now the loneliness you felt, as if by osmosis he becomes you, harried and searching, wanting and disdainful.
The clock ticks. Grain by grain, the hourglass empties its hate. White fists become the ashes of what could have been. Coal angels, ask and you shall receive. Yours, Sylvia, was a weird blue dream that might have been a sunny day gone stormy or an ocean sucked into the earth and swallowed whole. You wrote ‘what immortality is,’ but never meant it for yourself.
Sarah Collins Honenberger ’74 embraced a second career as an author at a Smith Alum Summer Session, SASS, in 1995. Her first novel, White Lies, was a 2007 nominee for the Library of Virginia Fiction award and her second novel, Waltzing Cowboys, just released in January 2009, is an Editor’s Pick on Bookviews.com. More at www.readhonenberger.com.
Nicholas cried out in the night, Mama, while Frieda worried tears to threadbare skin. And Ted wept, thinking he had done it to himself. Or perhaps not able to stop himself, rejoiced to think he was the ultimate tutor then, the mentor and the pupil merged, control that had escaped him with your pulsing heart and brain. And again now and now and now he pushes the lines across the page, hidden in the dark hole, enemy of the red bursts that split a body bold. The river washes by him, prostitute poet, flotsam on the flooded shore.
Remembering the crowded sidewalks, pram caught on the curb, and blackened letters in your hand, he struggles to forget. Instead he writes it down, the birthday letters, before he remembers he no longer has you to type it out on a clean page and to send it out into the world, a pirate ship of starless greed. He blots out sharp phrases from your journals, lies down in still waters, and genuflects to his own image reflected there. The thought-fox warily sets lame prints in snow, colder and deeper in the darkness than Ted’s nightmares or the weeping children’s waking dreams. The eye widens, coming about its own business, and he thinks he touches again the melting fingers and your smile. Blinded, he writes and lies and sells them wholesale, the gold pieces heavy on his heart. Your story, just a story, he says. Yet he knows now the loneliness you felt, as if by osmosis he becomes you, harried and searching, wanting and disdainful.
The clock ticks. Grain by grain, the hourglass empties its hate. White fists become the ashes of what could have been. Coal angels, ask and you shall receive. Yours, Sylvia, was a weird blue dream that might have been a sunny day gone stormy or an ocean sucked into the earth and swallowed whole. You wrote ‘what immortality is,’ but never meant it for yourself.
Sarah Collins Honenberger ’74 embraced a second career as an author at a Smith Alum Summer Session, SASS, in 1995. Her first novel, White Lies, was a 2007 nominee for the Library of Virginia Fiction award and her second novel, Waltzing Cowboys, just released in January 2009, is an Editor’s Pick on Bookviews.com. More at www.readhonenberger.com.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Party Time! Save the date!
You are cordially invited to the release party and reading for the fall print issue of Labrys! We hope you'll come in out of the snow for some arty/litty festivity!
Where: The Poetry Center, Wright Hall, Smith College!
When: Friday, February 20th at 7 PM!
What: Food, Poems, Prose, Artwork, Music, Magazines!
For Lillian by Anonymous
Perched on Hail Mary,
on the verge of Our Father,
the Apostles and their Creed
thread between your frail fingers.
Rocking back and forth,
paper thin eyelids drawn closed—
I can see the thoughts behind them.
Your lips are moving
and what you are saying
fills the room
although no sound escapes you.
on the verge of Our Father,
the Apostles and their Creed
thread between your frail fingers.
Rocking back and forth,
paper thin eyelids drawn closed—
I can see the thoughts behind them.
Your lips are moving
and what you are saying
fills the room
although no sound escapes you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)