My best friend, a sweet man,
drove all the way from Mankato
when my wife left me. At the door
he stood as tall as I
and we hugged. Then he said,
“Look good you. How manage?
Can’t imagine. If my wife left
for sure gunmyheadshoot will.”
I gave him a don’t-be-silly shove.
Before he left, I could feel him looking
at me. He said that seeing me alone
made him cherish his wife. He did,
but his wife left him anyway
and—well, he did.

John Lee Clark

I love trees that stay
away from me. But when a leafy finger
pokes my eye, I squint.
I’m willing to dismiss it
as an irony. A limb
that knocks my head because I didn’t duck?
That turns my heart into a chainsaw.

John Lee Clark

The trails are filled with fresh snow
Let’s put on your skis and get out
Don’t just sit around and glue to your screen
Put that motherfucking phone down

The food your mom prepared is ready
Don’t make her yell your name out loud
You better get your ass off the couch
Put that motherfucking phone down

The piano is getting lonely and dusty
You have not played a single sound
You need to learn your notes and counts
Put that motherfucking phone down

The laundry is clean and ready to be folded
Straighten out your grumpy face and put on a smile
You need to do some chores around the house
Put that motherfucking phone down

The opportunities won’t last forever
Take advantage of them now
Get up, get out, and do something wild
Put that motherfucking phone down

Donny Trương

I want to begin this story where it ends.
He drops me at the station in the rain before dawn
and says well, should I kiss you goodbye.
His eyebrows rise into the boredom of his body
the way they’d rise in class when someone
suggested Leopold Bloom was homosexual.
All over New Jersey it’s raining. He is speeding
to the train, thinking if he can get me there on time
he will not have to wait, and I do actually mistake
a blurry streetlamp for the moon and nod yes
to the kiss as if he’d offered it. At the end
I’m a helmet of ambivalence. All transparent shield,
all bulletproof bubble, the vast yes and no of pure metal.
In the middle I can’t sleep so I suck on his cock.
It stays limp in my mouth as desire like venom
seeps into the past where I sat on the vast other side
of his desk to talk about my future and his wall
made of books cut a path through the sea back to Ithaca.
Now around us the bodies of sixteen-year-old boys
are asleep on both floors of the dorm and his cock
is a mumbled apology for whatever they did or did not
want from me in the middle of the story as the story
goes: I don’t go to that school anymore, I am as old
as Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke, the end
of books. It’s morning, my ticket in hand.

Taije Silverman

This guy I used to know—a friend of mine-my
ex-husband I met at nineteen on a blind

date though I could see by the time
our fried clams had arrived it wasn’t meant

to be—he said time would only
tell—I said meantime I’ll only be

wishing you well but when
the check came he was a different

man—I mean he was my student—or I
his and he was obviously an expert in early

sixth-century anonymous Gaelic poetry
that revolves around a rhyme scheme—

as he explained over the beer we shared illegally
after class—in which changing the placement

of any one word means reducing
the poem to nonsense. He was good

with his head—or hands—or at nothing
but baking bread although when all was said

and done he remained a rabid Catholic
who wanted to ban the word embryo

or he was having an emotional affair
with a pregnant woman and loved jawbreakers

and whether I ran into him at Walmart
or we went intentionally to the river is beside

the point because he was a black hole
which meant not actually on earth and therefore

could only be known as the Dark Lord (his name
was Josh) or the World’s Most Apologetic Liar

or the illustrious co-author of How to Surmise
Then Hypnotize Your Real Mr. Right and we spent

a single night together without technically
inhaling but the divorce still proved undoing

for the children. He was the father
of my dictionary. He was an irreplaceable

rhyme for baby. He was my third
love, my second chance, a trampoline’s notion

of romance. Maybe now, maybe then,
maybe if, or so the end refrains. He was one

of a number of mistakes I made
for which I don’t take blame.

Taije Silverman

All the pretty girls.
Parsley, sage, salt, glue.
And you’re a big help to him
says my husband’s father
when I share his news of promotion.
Hey, hey, buckle my shoe,
No sing me a new song mama
says my son before bed.
All the pretty girls.
No another song.
Lost my partner what’ll I do,
lost my partner what’ll I do.
Skip to my lou my darling.
No a new song.
Hey little girl is your daddy home
did he go and leave you all alone
I got a bad desire.
Where am I going with this
I’m thinking while he watches
his pillow to picture the words.
All the pretty girls.
He fucked the shit out of her explained
my father about the plot of a movie.
The pretty girls.
Dad do you have to say that to me?
Mama another one. Mama a new one.
Well I’m sorry but that’s what he did.
You’re a big help to him.
All the pretty girls.

Taije Silverman

Don’t you know your Latin said the poet who wanted to kiss me
repeating cupio dissolvi until I wrote the words down

on a placemat. He was taking me out again for dinner.
He was telling me every small thing I should hear. Grinzosa

means wrinkled; beltá is like beauty but no longer used.
You weren’t here, he wasn’t you, what’s my crime, come on.

It means love for the end is what he tried to explain, but saying
I had to drink more wine because he wanted to.

Eliot called Pound the better locksmith in Italian
although a poet loves inloveness more than any iron gate.

Today’s the Day of the Immaculate Conception and so
the locksmith shops aren’t open. I had to call a number listed

under SOS after locking myself out of my apartment and when
the locksmith learned that I’d come from the city of Rocky Balboa,

he agreed to stay for a cup of coffee. Cupio means wish
but also yearn for and hunger, to covet, to crave and to need.

What’s the difference, I asked the poet, between love
for the end and for pretty young bodies-good question, he said

and he puzzled like a stoplight, but there is one, there is one, there is.
I wanted him to want to kiss me too. The locksmith is a widower.

He never thought his wife would die, not once
in forty years, he said-it just wasn’t a thought he ever had.

We agreed at our stupidity but in his eyes was loneliness I didn’t want
to recognize; I know he’d feel the same and didn’t blame me.

I want to ask the poet what’s the difference between beauty
and a beauty that’s no longer used, or the difference

between death and to dissolve. These aren’t the kinds of questions
I would ask you. Husband, you’re the absence of longing.

And I promise I’ll grow old and die. And I promise I’ll give you my life.

Taije Silverman

I want a story to keep me company while my husband
stares into his phone, beside me in bed. Any story.
That a man named Solon planned the whole city of Athens
while in love with his mother’s friend’s son. He broke his hand

trying to catch a turtle on the roof of a temple
is what I want to be told while my husband plays scrabble
against any number of people he hasn’t seen in years.
Exist for forty points links to stop for twenty-five which

he drops into tranq for its q worth at least half the house.
Slang for a person or thing that will act as a sedative.
Tonight after three episodes of a show about Russian spies
with perfect American accents, I ask if he like peanuts

and he says he loves peanuts, and it’s as if we’ve just met
and are fools for each other, still make out on sidewalks at dawn.
Plutarch recounted the life of Solon “at a time when history
was by no means an academic discipline” wrote someone

on Wikipedia, while Solon wrote a law forbidding slaves
from being gymnasts because his mother’s friend’s son
was a gymnast and a slave and because he didn’t
fall in love with Solon back. “It is irrational to renounce

what we want for fear of losing it,” wrote Plutarch.
His eyes in a duel with the screen of his phone, my husband asks
what dentist I’ll see tomorrow, and two minutes later:
Did I remember to turn down the heat. Academic, irrational,

exist for thirty-two, tranq for a house with central heating.
Tell me the one about the peanut that choked Plutarch,
tell me about the backflipping slave. Solon invented the euphemism.
Prisons as chambers, policemen as guards. I love you,

I’ve said, enough times to make history, or join it, and I mean it,
did you turn down the heat. Let’s be civilized, said Solon.
And: No man is allowed to sell his daughter unless she’s not a virgin.
He made a law forbidding unions that defeat the object of marriage,

but the object of marriage was an acrophobic turtle at a time
by no means known for steep temple roofs. Four days from now
I’m brushing my teeth when my husband says, I don’t feel
any love from you at all. Solon would answer this usefully.

He made a law stating that immediately upon marriage,
bride and bridegroom should be locked in a chamber to eat a quince.
Or if not immediately, then four days from now. Count no one happy
until he’s dead, said Solon, to the happiest person alive.

Taije Silverman

The boy at my poetry reading wants to start a reliquary.
He might be twelve, his belly billowing like a safety
net for his body and his thick, curly hair the color
of Tang. His shoulders have the breadth and weight
of a kitchen cupboard but his voice is a child’s,
girlish and mannered. His name is River.

He tells me the bolt he found along the bank of a river
will be the first official piece of his reliquary.
Meaningful objects are hard to come by, he says with a child’s
comic gravity, but I’ve got this bolt. Lifesaver-
shaped erasers line the shop counter behind him beside paperweights
of Paris. In the Q&A his cheeks prick a muddled rum color

each time he asks a question, like What’s your favorite color?
and Do you believe in numerology? His mother scolds, River!
when he asks my deepest fear, but he waits
for my answer. I want to ask how he knows what a reliquary
is. I want to know what the bolt looks like, if it’s right now safe
in his pocket and if the sign it held warned CHILDREN

CROSSING or WIND GUSTS. A child’s
deepest fear is not of danger but of loss, though of loss that doesn’t color
what comes after. Absence without aftermath. He’s so intent on saving
what surrounds him that who he’ll be without it must seem, to River,
as abstract as old age—a minor evil that the simplest of reliquaries
could overcome. I want to hold the bolt’s small, solid weight

in my hand, hold its useless intention, but people are waiting
to buy my book and tell me how when they were children
they also lost their mothers, as if inside reliquaries
we keep grief, and not the rose-scented and colorless
bones of saints. As if grief could carry us like rocks across a river,
embedded in sediment so we might safely

walk above water. But grief is the water. I have saved
messages from answering machines and a nearly weightless
shred of cork, several post-it notes, and a petal from a river
of curbside cherry blossoms that my father scooped like a child
with both hands to let fly in front of my mother. Moth-colored
powerless petal. And then-isn’t a book also a reliquary?

River waits in line to ask what he should put in his reliquary.
Instead of signing my name I list: a used eraser, a child’s watercolor,
and a page from your diary saying you haven’t lost anything,
you’re safe.

Taije Silverman

Mama, my son moans when he dreams again that I’m gone.
His hand on my finger curves into a lock when I stand.

I remember my mother’s shape in the darkness
like a pattern, sew it to the quilt, dip the stitch, pull.

Not her smell nor her actual voice when she said she was leaving. Long ago rustle of now.

And he’s sleeping the whole lit known night long,
my fur-feather baby, lobe and lung,
You know I can’t stay, you know

I’ll be here forever. It was a dream is what I say
when he tells me I left and that the house
became bigger and trapped him inside his room.

Nameless rainmaker, pattern of drops, and all we remember
the story we tell of it after.

The dead in the ground are the dark good shapes,
here by the bed to stay just a little while longer.
His warm one lock of a hand.

Hold harder, oh pure constellation.

How do we die, my son asks one night without context while we’re choosing his five bedtime books.

Taije Silverman