i wish the world would stop for me.
in its tracks, never felt such weight
gracefully crumble onto its palms.
i’ve added a couple of pounds
since i started walking the hypotenuse,
driving my life with triangular wheels.
what can i say—i came out of the womb horizontal.
how to lessen the weight?
starve yourself of these earthly pleasures.
shelter a cocoon and live and laugh all you want,
but wait until the world doesn’t glare anymore,
then the roads are open to rapture.
run as you will—lose more weight,
but swallow that impossible feeling.
it will be weightless gain.
full, impossible to hate again.
i swear i don’t miss the empty well,
where every sip of water is an echo in a spacious cave.
to be perfect is to cut skin and bone
and i no longer have to do so.
i am ever-molding surface no more.
my thinning love rhymes with pounds and mounds
and one day i’ll be loved and give love,
but still wonder if the jawline is sharp enough to cut.
when there is a way to measure how heavy,
learn to step down from the scale
and keep your worth (or weight) inside you.
after all, even a word sounding as nasty as rapture can mean bliss.
王潇 / Evan Wang is a 15-year-old poet from King of Prussia whose work has appeared in Juste Milieu, Bleeding Soul Poetry, The National Poetry Quarterly, etc. He is the recipient of the Youth Appreciation Award and a featured artist in the Our America Now festival. Evan is spellbound by the catharsis of the moving language and worships the pens of Savannah Brown and Ocean Vuong.