Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Weinstein: The Long Count

© Cynthia Reeser

The Long Count
by Eric Weinstein

i should never have left
the womb.

i write this face down
in the bathtub,
the half-dark of submersion.

here, i remember my hands being built.
i remember how it felt
to accrete from water.

here begins the counting,
the inestimable road to
elsewhere.

i have read that the maya
built a calendar
for setting apart age
from age.

no one knows why it starts
in the middle, as though
it came before them.

they said we are living
in the fourth world, and that many
will follow this one,

that soon, the numbers will roll a
round
to all zeroes (which they invented),
we will have to go on.

or,
we could always die.

(xibalba
was their misplaced
underworld, a dark rift
in the milky way.)

and i have read that
venus, she
was more important to them
than even the sun.

coming up for air,
you are more important to me
than even the sun:

our first kiss on one college campus,
our last on another,
the soundless hours, the wreck of days
remembered,

the counting.

if i could go back,
i might remain in the moment of my genesis
forever.

—or, more likely,

i would go only to last summer,
find us chest-deep in the atlantic,
me carrying you,
your face pressed, laughing, to the side of my neck.

Eric Weinstein recently graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with an AB in English and Philosophy. He was born in Macon, Georgia and grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire. He currently lives and writes in Hoboken, New Jersey. His poetry has previously appeared in The Archive, Wheelhouse Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Rainy Day, and others, and has won several awards, including the Anne Flexner Prize in Poetry.