One time I came home from schoolto a bedroom painted halfwaytwo shades of blue,rollers beached in azure-scabbed trays,lidless quarts of midnight and noonseparating from their waterlike souring cups of milk, my mothersprawled on the floor, her handstwo lilies powdered with moonlight.But there was beauty too: my mother, highup on a ladder, nailing her wedding dress to a tree,divorce paper twitching in the yardlike chickens pecking feed.For years the nailheads sparkledat night, bespoke constellationsas the grackles harvested the dress for nest-scrapsand a dozen Texan summerschewed through stitch and seamwith their 92 jagged teeth.If there is to be any truth in beautyI can’t just speak about sufferingas if there isn’t some good in suffering too.As the coyote becomes mud for zinnias,so can these McDonald’s receipts becomea moon, greased napkins a banquet of clouds,crusted daubs of glitter glue every guiding star.A thousand miles from my originmy origin remains why I promisewhen I blue, I will completely blue.I will show you how you canmake a sky out of anything.
Arts and Crafts with the Addict’s Son
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“Arts and Crafts with the Addict’s Son” from RAGNARÖK AT THE FATHER-DAUGHTER DANCE: by Todd Dillard.
Published by Variant Literature on October 31st, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Todd Dillard.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Todd Dillard’s work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. His debut collection Ways We Vanish was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award, and his current manuscript Pear Snow was a finalist for the 2025 AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize. His chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance is available from Variant Literature. Todd lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children, where he works as a writer for a hospital.
The titular father of Todd Dillard’s marvelous chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance quickly tells us “It’s my job to find the dead.” And so he does, navigating surfaced graveyards, insistent ghosts, a pandemic veiling the planet, all while his daughter and other children burst through like “[the] chimney on my house spears the dusk of each day.” Like swallows through an open window, “They know the way.” Dillard takes us to a museum of walls, on flight lessons, adding imagery and nuance to our understanding of a “whole life / contemplating the knife’s edge, / sharpest, like death, / when no light thorns its length.” Yet these poems reveal that light, as a moon’s reflection sewn into a lake’s night surface and an origami swan sunning in the windowsill, as names we use to find one another in life and dreams.
—Ben Kline, author of It Was Never Supposed To Be
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