Three Poems

by Liza Sophia


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In the Dying Embers

​Like paper lanterns, birds hang themselves
on the telephone lines, feathers alight &

I wonder - do you know how many beautiful things
have gorged themselves on your pedestal,

or that in time, every wing becomes nothing
but a torch thrust skyward?

The birds regurgitate fireflies;
they burn up from the inside out &

I still can’t bring myself to choke your name
into anything but the most temperate silence.

I polish the silverware and string it
tinsel-like in the doorframe. I like things

that sparkle in a way that says something
about space that’s always busy with absence,

I like the birds that burn on spits better than the drowned ones
the way they turn and turn after offering plumage to the flame

is closer to what we human lovers do. The way they fall
off the bone. Nameless love, I leave a place for you

and your lover by the hearth. Know its light swallows
all it touches, what rests between us. I feed it only that

which has been turned and turned again in tender
hands. This yellowed room, an early migration.

The birds molt into day. Small suns of language
rise and fall between flocks and turn them transient.

They feed fire to their young. Nameless love,
what is a lover but a bird too slow to escape

this room these walls this light. Tucked flush
against a feathered breast we are what
​
if not tricks of the light. The birds burrow
into a milk blue sky and redefine the underground.


​The Locals

While wandering the desert, I came across an oasis
of rock, sanded and smoothed by the decades
& home to a stomach-dwelling desert creature
slithering through the tunnels of stone.

They had no love for me, the foreign biped,
yet were gracious and taught me their language
of hands, how they communicated through touch
alone. We are where the water used to run

they caressed into my chest. It will be back, once
it remembers. So will you. They lick softly
into my cheek, poppy red tongues staining
sandstone on my collarbone. It’s nature’s way

of making sure you remember.


Soulscape

Imagine skin
       unbound        the soul

       backstitched across
its underbelly.
​
Vivacious insistence
       quilts a glimmering

                blood-sheen lamé
draped iridescent

over bone, soul
     to soul you       unwind

     me. Soft lips pressed
     firm to stitch mold

the frame    of my body
​
beading breath imbues
        this tremulous ache    depose
​
        the carnal flesh lay
with me on the bed
​
of inner body &
         unwind me. The sky

shimmers carnivorous.
​
Soul   surrounds us
in this pitch red flatland

       slick with an unshed
rain         everything breaks
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       into color &
       the seat of the soul  becomes

where  we spread the picnic
blanket &      spill the champagne.

Beneath the intersection of bone
that best mimics                the irregularity
​
of midnight, un-become                    with me.
The biological  clock  tick

shakes loose           the hold

       strikes  hairline fracture
through bone.   Vivisection

re-becomes autopsy.
       Crests of breath

              indent the ornate
temple of my head

let this corpse
         contort for you until

soul-side up,     skin
        unknit from mold,

        climbs in chrysalides
across your body.

Imagine skin
       unbound from soul

       unstitched   and salvaged
from the synchronism

of the way these    bodies
rot.

Imagine


Liza Sophia is a student of Art History and Comparative Literature at Hunter College, with a vested interest in the surreal nature of the intersection between poetry and the visual arts. 


​​​​​​​​​SHARE - Issue: 2.1 / October 2026