i'll never be a poet

sculptor

(i know the secret to interdimensional travel.

the old folk call it dreaming. the modern teenager calls it shifting.

i stand on the prickly fence between both, for i am twenty.

don't be surprised, do i sound my age? do i sound- and i pray with all my soul i do not- pretentious? do i sound overgrown for the language i secrete out my fingers? do i wish i have a century's worth of wisdom in my yellow crackled bones?

anyway. the trick to unlocking the universe is in your mind.)

i close my eyes and now my body is not flesh, but clay. run my thumb over the valley between my breasts, smoothing out the bumps that terraform the plain. pinch the extra chin under my jaw off, dragging the excess up to under my ears. carve upward lines into the fatty skin folding over sleepy, cock-eyed pupils. melt the extra lines at the corners of my mouth away with a watered brush.

every night, i practise the subtraction with my hands, hoping my etched fingerprints file off enough fat cells and cartilage to release my desired form from the mould. every night, i pluck and pull and scrape and knead and batter with pinching calloused fingertips for my clay to bend to my will.

it's practice, of course, but practice doesn't make perfect. practice doesn't wear any physical thing down- just the heart. practice presses lethargy into my hypothalamus. practise your shifting, girl, reality is what you make of it. but carrying all this dead, dead weight around like gelatinous shackles is embarrassing.

i open my eyes, and i am who You say i am.