Eric Weinstein is currently finishing an AB in English and Philosophy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He was born in Macon, Georgia and grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire. He is currently living, working, and writing in New York City. His poetry has recently appeared in The Archive and Wheelhouse Magazine, is forthcoming in The Indite Circle, and has won several awards, including the Anne Flexner Prize in poetry.

Eric Weinstein

as i turn your head in the palms of my hands

(supraorbital ridges, temporal lines)

i wonder what color

your eyes might have been, or what your voice

once sounded like.

i wrote your name in my journal this morning:

osteology homework, subject #12.

 

i catalog the geometries of your face,

the seams of your being well-worn.

your architecture smoothed, angled,

aged grey by fluorescent light,

an era in a medical school library.

 

and as i pass my fingers over your forehead

down to the cheek bones,

as though to close your eyes,

 

i imagine that maybe in someone's dream

you are alive,

and here is my skull, and here you are,

shirt-sleeves rolled to the elbows,

pointing out to one hundred students in a lecture

my zygomatic processes:

 

and i am grinning back at them,

“quod sum eris” clenched neatly between my teeth,

the histories of life and death locked

in the still reach of air behind my eyes.