Sophie Panzer is the author of the chapbooks Survive July (Red Bird Chapbooks 2019) and Mothers of the Apocalypse (Ethel Press 2019). She has edited prose for Scrivener Creative Review and Inklette. Sophie was named a 2020 Writer-in-Residence for Scholastic’s A Suite of One’s Own: A Writer’s Residency and a 2017 QWF Literary Prize for Young Writers winner. Her work has appeared in The Hellebore, Coffin Bell Journal, Sad Girl Review, Little Old Lady Comedy, Josephine Quarterly, PULP Literature, Gingerbread House, carte blanche, and others. She works as a journalist and lives in Philadelphia.
The Bird
Once upon a time
there was a girl who climbed
a castle wall and became
a knot of feathers,
hollow bones,
shivering heart.
Once upon a time
there was a girl who climbed
a castle wall and became
a knot of feathers,
hollow bones,
shivering heart.
Her friends were birds now too –
she watched them hurtle
into cages, they craved
the weight of them, those
gilded bars, those
dogs and jobs
and husbands.
But she flew over them
to Barcelona, Budapest,
because she could live
on breadcrumbs now
and would never be
this light again.