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

Klim released Family, an everyday typeface based on Clearface—originally designed by Morris Fuller and Linn Boyd Benton. Of course, a new font family comes with an in-depth essay by Kris Sowersby. Worth a read for type nerds.

I have nothing but love for my wife
But at times her words cut like a knife.

Dear all,

I concurred with everyone’s feedback. It was like a huge family gathering without the dramas. Mad kudos to all the leaders, the parents, and especially the kids—without them, we would not have been together in one room. I hope no one got sick.

I have a small suggestion to some of the parents, especially the fathers, to talk to your doctor about sleep apnea and sleep test. We had the entire orchestra playing during the night. I have sleep apnea myself and I brought the CPAP machine with me. It really helped with the music playing.

Chị K, anh T, S, and O, welcome to the Hung Vuong Family (not the Thang Long Family) LOL!

Cheers!

I don’t have a clue what I had read. Mlinko’s poems are way beyond my limited comprehension of poetry. I read the entire collection twice and couldn’t pick out one for my blog. It’s definitely not her; it’s me.

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

and sipping with tears.
I’m missing you everyday, mama.
I wish you were still here.

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Yesterday was Whitetail’s last day for the season. Blame it on Mother Nature. She has been warm the entire winter. We hadn’t had a snowstorm. If the weather stays this way Liberty and Roundtop will be shutting down soon as well.

I took Đạo and Xuân to Liberty yesterday to test out my new Rome United bindings, which I found a good deal on Amazon for $100. The price has gone back up to $160. Since I bought the Capita board that came with the step-in Flow bindings, I just went with it. I liked the convenience of the step-in style, but the way they strapped the top of my feet made me excruciatingly uncomfortable when I turned, particularly on my toe side.

The cause for the pain was not just the old bindings but also the way I turned. I tended to initiate my turns way too late. I pivoted my back foot too much to control my speed on my toe side. As a result, I slowed myself down and burned my legs. I need to fix this habit.

The Rome United bindings only strapped my toes and ankles; therefore, they were more tolerable. I still felt a bit of a pain when I pivoted, but it was not as bad as before. I am keeping the Rome United bindings. I hope I still have a chance to continue to hone my skills before the season’s over.

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