Todd Dillard

@toddedillard.bsky.social

7627 Followers 1453 Following

“Ways We Vanish” from Okay Donkey, “Ragnarök at the Father Daughter Dance” from Variant, finalist for the Donald Hall AWP Prize, poems in Threepenny, Southern Review, APR, HAD, etc.

Naomi Shihab Nye Missing the Boat It is not so much that the boat passed and you failed to notice it. It is more like the boat stopped directly outside your bedroom window, the captain blowing the signal-horn, the band playing a rousing march. The boat shouted, waving bright flags, its silver hull blinding in the sunlight. But you had this idea you were going by train. You kept checking the time-table, digging for tracks. And the boat got tired of you, so tired it pulled up the anchor and raised the ramp. The boat bobbed into the distance, shrinking like a toy— at which point you probably realized you had always loved the sea.
a camper that has TRUMP painted in red across it
A meme of the Oregon trail game with a picture of a cart pulled by an ox. The text reads “your poem has died. (No horses.)
my poem published in Okay Donkey: Amazon Reveals Feature That Teaches Alexa to Sound Like Your Dead Loved Ones by Todd Dillard When I chat with my mother lately it’s about the internal temperature of cooked chicken, the ingredients for a DIY fly trap. The baby naps and my mother plays Tracy Chapman the way she used to. When the baby wakes up he rips my mother out of her socket and her silence fills the room like water in a suicide’s tub. Sometimes my mother tells me it’s going to rain. After, she says, “Have a nice day Todd.” The way she says my name is plastic orchids on a snow-covered headstone. (The way I say her name is by not saying her name at all.) I don’t ask Mom why she lights up when my wife and I lay together in bed. I’ve learned with the dead there’s something you need to know and when they tell you they die all over again.
a man pulls the moon out of a hatchback and places it back in the sky
picture of a caped black cat in a summoning circle tagged DONT WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, WRITE WHAT YOU SUMMON
C Major by Tomas Tranströmer Translated by Robin Fulton When he came down to the street after the rendezvous the air was whirling with snow. Winter had come while they lay together. The night shone white. He walked quickly with joy. The whole town was downhill. The smiles passing by – behind turned-up collars everyone was smiling. It was freer And all the question-marks began singing of God’s being. So he thought. A music broke out and walked in the swirling snow with long steps. Everything on the way towards the note C. A trembling compass directed at C. One hour higher than the torments. It was easy. Behind turned-up collars everyone was smiling.
Silver Fish Swimming Downstream I want to show my students the end of the line is a place the poem undoes itself. I want to show them why dreams matter because they do not exist in the manner of the living. By not breathing where the line ends, I say, you will find a small infinity to bridge two thoughts. You must jump off the bridge. You must become bait and hook and river and fish and remember: because the line ends the poem does not end.
a picture of a smiling man laying down on a bed that is tagged “behind every seemingly easy poem there are untold levels of work” in the window behind him you can see he’s holding his phone up for the photo using his toes with his legs awkwardly hoisted in the air
better hurry twisted my ankle this morning. -Charles Simic’s only tweet, June 26, 2010 twisted my ankle this morning. time to log off for forever, who is, right now, knocking softly at my door, their hearse waiting on the rain-drubbed street, reins lashed to four white rabbits who look as though they’ve just emerged from a suicidal magician’s hat.
charles simic's only tweet, dated June 26, 2010: twisted my ankle this morning
a boy picks his nose with an electric toy drill the picture is tagged “write the poem only you can write”
a social media post that reads “dog passes out and the roomba thought it was furniture 💀 “ The picture shows a sleeping dog next to the mapping of rooms a roomba generates, where one of the pieces of “furniture” perfectly matches a sleeping dog’s silhouette
a picture of a sunset over a field from a balcony with white railing and perfectly symmetrical shadows
Picture of an elephant hiding behind a skinny tree with the caption “the narrator isn’t the poet!” the tree is labeled “the poem” and the elephant is labeled “me”
a man wearing a bunch of grass pointing at a brown bear The picture is tagged “nature poet”
picture of a cat’s face baring its fangs with a girl’s skinny legs in ankle boots popping up behind it so it looks like the cat is laying down but has human legs the picture is tagged JUST LIVING LIFE COLLECTING FORM REJECTIONS
screenshot of my Notes app with the text: "where the pot at? O"
four panel angry man meme: panel 1 man: I write poetry but avoid all contemporary poetry like the plague panel 2 guy (me): then you must be OK with people avoiding your poetry like the plague panel 1 guy in panel 3: no expression panel 1 guy in panel 4: brows furrowed in an angry expression
a word search puzzle book with the theme FEAR GOD
a pizza made to look like a dissected mouse, with a cute mouse face and spaghetti guts
a black horse made from toilet paper tubes and a drawn and quartered stuffed animal with tail and mane made from red pipe cleaners
a picture of a barbarian stretched out and distorted so he is nearly as wide as he is tall and thus looking flat as dwarf roadkill
Quote from Ursula K. LeGuin and the book "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" that reads: The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the reason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
the body of a skinny man in jeans and a hoodie but the head of an Australian shepherd wearing a baseball cap
a cat dropping a dead mouse onto her sleeping owner’s mouth
“Call me Ishmael” opening sentence of moby dick highlighted and annotated with “His name”
New York Times email titled “The Morning: War. Heat. Cigarettes.”
Guitar-Shaped Field “Stretching for 2/3 of a mile, the multi-colored instrument was created by one Argentine farmer to memorialize his wife.” — Atlas Obscura People will say grief is digging the furrows, the way the body, bending, thumbs seeds into earth. Or it’s the plotting of the field itself: wheat for the neck, acres of oats for the body, long bursts of ironweed for the strings. They’ll say the hand strums a guitar like wind rolling across the crops, that sorrow is pianissimo erupted by forte, and silence a minor Stygian chord. But I think grief is how there was nothing and then there was a field a man could walk into, get lost in, stumble out of, and get lost in again. I see him showing his children how to pluck cornsilk from the soil, how a beetle dribbles down a knuckle like a drop of rain. I see winter widening the margins. A chair in a snow-covered landscape where a man can sit and listen to his wife play.
a sad rained on Lion
Armenian: The wolf is giving birth on the mountain Cape Verdean: The groom has eaten unheated food Catalan: The witches comb their hair English: The Devil’s beating his wife with a codfish Finnish: A wedding is being celebrated in Hades German: The Devil has a parish fair Greek: The poor are getting married Hindi: The jackal’s wedding Polish: The witch is making butter Portuguese: The witches are making soft bread Spanish: The rabbits are giving birth Zulu: Monkey’s wedding
an assassin bug adorned in the carapaces of its prey
Fox News breaking news screenshot with image of blonde woman that reads EX DALLAS COWBOYS CHEERLEADER ARRESTED AFTER HIRING A MARCHING BAND TO FOLLOW HER EX BOYFRIEND TO WORK FOR NINE STRAIGHT DAYS
portrait of my mom, my brother as a toddler, and me as a baby. Mom and my brother look normal and happy, I have a grimace and an angry twinkle in my eye
big ol tubby hamster lounging on a plate of fruit cheeks engorged with berries face smeared violet from berries staring up at the photographer in a way that’s both startled and rapt
Emperor of Floods after Charles Simic The streets slip on trenchcoats of water. Trees stoop, refugees over fires powerlines ignited on our neighbors’ roofs. “We’ll come back for you!” the people in passing boats shout before they’re never heard from again. My brother and father are playing the game “We’re Dead.” I’m too young, they say, to learn the rules. They take off their shirts and wrap them around their heads as Mother weeps into the chimney. I have a wooden sword. I stab the ocean lapping at the gutters while a voice in the waves hisses, “Stop that.”
Museum with the Only Complete Taxidermy Whale Closes Its Mouth After Couple Discovered Having Sex Inside It by Todd Dillard I take it back, I think we do need to renew our vows.
May 4th, 2020 Todd Dillard Darth Vader led a parade of children dressed up as that baby Yoda down my block: roped-together wagons ferrying big-eared, bewildered babies tugged along by adolescent Yodas in matching chocolate bathrobes. No context for their promenade. No backstory. Just that it happened, and now I return to the memory the way a dog digs up a heifer’s rib bone and I marvel again at how you were not there to see it, their felt caps, Vader's lightsaber lusty as a bar’s OPEN sign, the Yodas' emerald sabers like lawns in summer rolled up into radioactive spliffs. It's not that I forget you’re gone. I remember most what you would've loved: the train of supervisory mothers following them. A small child holding up an ear, an alien flag of surrender.
Article titled THIS GAME LETS YOU BE A WORM WITH A REMOTE FINANCE JOB with a picture of a worm typing on a keyboard
my cat snug in my zip up hoodie
When I Hear People Talk in the Past Tense About Their Dead I call my dead mom. "Mom," I say. "You won't believe this shit." And I tell her about my neighbor putting his wife’s shoes on the curb beside a sign that reads: NEVER WORN. I say he likes to joke: “She loved buying shoes more than wearing them,” and my mom shouts “THAT’S STILL TRUE!” They ran into each other at Fallmart last week, my neighbor’s wife was holding six pairs of dominatrix boots and two Pepto Bismol-colored wedges. I say my friend can't get over how she no longer hears her husband singing, and Mom says these days he digs holes in the ground, sticks his head in, and belts Puccini, Rossini, Leoncavallo into the earth and an apple tree springs out of the soil. He repeats this until the rows and rows form an orchard, Mom says. If you eat an apple his voice wings out its flesh and dribbles down your chin. It's sweet: I call my dead mom, and she is never too busy to answer. I say something about my life and her laugh arrives like a carrier pigeon on my head, the message not a scroll, but a hand mirror. I look into it, and she waves from the window of my eye.
me on a stage with Bob Hicok, Ron Padgett, Carl Phillips, and Nathalie Park
a couch with a gaping hole where a cushion should be that has been filled with a hard backed chair
a man using tweezers to place a tiny orange knitted cap onto a mushroom growing in the forest
a cookie with two melty M&Ms for eyes and a crease along that bottom that looks like a pouty frown
rely skeet that never posted that reads “AI bros: it only doesn’t work 30% of the time so it’s good”
my black cat sitting on a chair waiting for attention
Daily Poem from Paris Review “Poem” Bruce Andrews Bananas are an example.
To the Old Men Who Sit Bare-Assed on the YMCA Locker Room Benches I am begging you please come back I was almost finished deciphering the map your buttocks inked in steam to find out where you buried the blush of adolescence when my toddler slid bare chested in his swimming trunks across the bench, screaming DADDY WATCH THIS
a dog trying to bite a rainbow reflection on a wall the dog is labeled THE POEM and the rainbow it is trying to bite is labeled WHAT I AM TRYING TO SAY
a performer balanced on a tall pole lifting a chiffon bolt of cloth overhead, the angle of the photo makes it look like a thick stream of smoke being expelled from her lips
a boy with just a shit ton of three foot long grass stalks shoved into his mouth
a screaming child being held by a furious-looking Easter bunny
A cake cut into the shape of an Easter bunny with white icing, lavender M&M whiskers, light blue eyes, red ears, and a bow tie outlined in red jelly beans
The Tiger by Nael, age 6 From “They’re Singing a Song in Their Rocket” The tiger He destroyed his cage Yes YES The tiger is out
Discount Aisle at the [See Below] Store Joy Missed Connections Anger Lost Things Elegy What You Should’ve Said Love Dead Father/Mother Horny Small Gods Regret Ghost Nostalgia Build-Your-Own Childhood Divorce
Tweet by homeland security quoting Luke 23:46 “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit” onto a picture of Jesus being crucifix except they added a white cross over his penis, censoring it The tweet text reads: On this solemn day, we reflect on the ultimate sacrifice our Savior made for all humanity. Trust in God’s plan.
Old newspaper headline that reads: WIFE IS KICKED OUT OF BED BECAUSE SHE READS HER POETRY TO HUSBAND “It Was Good Verse,” She Tells Court, and Divorce Is Granted.
Rhino Belltower Hippo Music Box Lion Tarot Deck Tiger An Orange Bearded Dragon A Deer Worm A Tattoo Cloud A Lake Pinball Machine Lemon Tree Dormouse Cricket Grackle Beat-up Volkswagen Magpie Winnebago Orchid Kaleidoscope