Seven Poems
Sophia Reich
The Bathers
Moth-eaten light
traces orthogonals into
her body’s plane. A worn
torso etches itself
into the walls
as if it has been waiting
to meet the wind, to meet
the rain. Her right leg curves
like a silver pendulum
until it falls perpendicular with
the wooden planks. I sit across
from her bitter exhales,
anchored in the
weight of salt. I cannot help
but stare at the way
she swats at her shoulders
to disrupt the emptiness—
as though she can cleanse herself
of time. And how she lets
the spare glass-beads collect
just below
her blue temples and seep
from the creased valley
of her upper-lip
—they seem to seize the promise
of water. In time, I will
undress myself to the body
of a fragile membrane
against the black-pitted stones
and her flesh will become
the faint lines in my palm. There is no
fountain, no riverbed. You cannot
drink out of it, even when your tongue
is a warped petal, and you are
caught between your stifling
dreams.
Karma
Karma arrives
in gossamer tights—which cover
the silver capillaries of her ankles. She cuts
her ear lobes with blood-let garnets, perfumes
her pale laugh in absinthe.
With a cigarette holder
perched between her fingertips, she reveals
her pearl-like molars
as she invites you into her jagged nebula.
She says
that she is only staying for a couple nights,
perhaps in some damp, bleached-carpet ashtray of a motel
which parallels the interstate.
You let her walk into your life
as easily as a crow contorts its spine, as easily as
a streetcar skims lacquered steel.
Your dreams
are filled with decks of cards. Knaves and queens twist
in vermillion wind-tunnels, their turpentine bodies
as flimsy and oblivious as paper
itself. She fingers through the cards,
only to pause when she
reaches the hollowed face
of the fool.
You know that she will leave you—
and yet, like some forlorn lover
you wait on the other end of the line
in silence. Just long enough
so that the
telephone cord
begins to coil
around your soft, fetal neck.
Two Worlds
A man sits on the edge of
a highway, eternities separating him
from the solid dashes of titanium-white and
the starved headlights. He holds a sign to his
concave chest. Shredded cardboard meets
his wind-calloused fingertips. Drawn letters
melt like candle-wax. Is it all in vain?
Plastic bags sever the leathery tendons of
his ankles, and he vanishes into the
car-choked exhaust and the translucent
weeks. The cars drive by.
I once saw a deer caught between
two worlds. It hurled its abdomen
into a chain-link fence, over and
over again. What was beyond
the fence, I don’t know. Perhaps
the black-walnut
trees called to it or the
tear-soaked lichen. Its distant
crashes trembled in the woven drum
of my skull, as raw as the wounds
of a gorge. Those steel chains,
like daggers, recoiled into the turgid
underbelly of the deer
until its coat was red-clay and
its eyes were sphincters—
endlessly searching.
Ars Poetica
Poetry is the act of carving
away at Roman marble, as if to
liberate flesh
with the unconscious edge
of a chisel.
Let the solid bust
meet the tender grip
of your hands,
and the snow-bound
light penetrate
the eye. Feel the stone’s porousness,
as it siphons the heat
of your blushing fingers into its
sculpted tundra.
There is a pulse,
a root, a world resolving itself to
space. You can feel the cypress tree
as it writhes in the breath of
spring. Its green tendrils
weave like nylon sutures
towards the hand of God.
I fear the day
when I will have to forgo
the blade for the shovel. I will be
bound to overturn
the carcass of the earth, to
shunt the worm-eaten
impulses,
to bury the words. The lilies
will be left with iron lungs and
black-tarred veins.
And I will inscribe
their silent names in
the slate of a
tombstone.
Self-Portrait
Behind me walks a girl
in a red wool hat. She trails
behind, filling my slipstream
with her naïve
ways. It is as if
the midday sun
has peaked in the sky—
its lazy jaw hangs overhead and
gingerly casts a shadow
on the asphalt. She is quite a
bit shorter than me, and has hair
that hangs from her nape
like Spanish moss. She waltzes
in strange bluebells,
laughs in crinkled bits
of wrapping paper,
and presses her small nose against
carpeted floors. I like that
she follows me,
her narrow shoulders bow
to her jelly-footed
skips. She is blind—
in the way that ivy
is to rain. She seems to go away when
I need her the most. Her sugar
footprints dissolve into
graphite, liquify
into grey matter.
A breathless void
which leaves the hours long
and vacant. I awake
to rattling heaters and white
bed sheets only
to look at the pale numbers which glow before
my very eyes. And I think of her,
my sweet, sweet
shadow.
Rousseau’s Tigers
Anslem worked for
my grandparents. He had skin
the color of blackstrap molasses
and wore his jeans loosely
as if his leather belt was a ring of
Saturn and his narrow waist
was some distant planet. He would arrive
with metal pruners in hand,
and cut away at the lopsided mango tree
until it bore fruit again. I had never seen
anyone who had seen more suns
than Anselm. The whites of his
eyes were oxidized to the color of
dried palm, nicked with stagnant deltas
of blood. He didn’t say much
but I remember how I
thought he was the richest man
alive because of his gold-capped-teeth.
Once the rainy season came,
he stopped coming. His exit
was marked by the ping-pang
of stucco-roofs and the tender
drooping of vines. He must have
drank himself
to yesterday. I have searched
for the face of God
and found nothing
but the forked ribs
of a tiger.
the sparrow
you are the sparrow
which sits upon my windowsill—
how can you be so still?
god must have carved
your pupils out of
marble
and plastered your
wings
with sepia.
you tell me of the world and everything in it—
your distant lullabies
are like a silver flute
a faint whistle,
a strange chord.
you have seen
the oak undress herself,
threads
slipping
from her bare
shoulders
into echoes
of amber.
you have seen the
body of night
as it eats away
at the tender flesh of
daylight,
the flecks of mischief
upon a fawn’s
winter coat
and
the sternum
of the sunken pine
which only
native eyes
can see.
you make me wonder
how bones can be
hollow
i have become accustomed
to enamel,
to brushed collodion,
the walls
of paper mache
that leave particles
of ether
pressed against
my fingertips.
i want to tell you
to leave,
to go—
for every
moment
you are earth-bound
the shears of time
clip your gentle
wings.
perhaps in seeing
you
so still,
so fair,
i am reminded
a window is
just a cage
of
glass.
Sophia Reich (she/her) is a rising senior in the Honors College. Born and raised in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, she is double-majoring in cell biology & neuroscience (CBN) and art history. She gives special thanks to Professor November and Professor Miller, both of whom worked with her during the 2024-2025 academic year.