Todd Dillard
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toddedillard.bsky.social
Todd Dillard
@toddedillard.bsky.social
7.1K followers 1.4K following 5.5K posts
“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.
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toddedillard.bsky.social
lithub’s bracket got me thinking about lit drama and I remembered this tweet which I thought was from 2019 and it’s actually from last year 😣
tweet by me that reads: lit world drama is so funny like “don’t post your acceptances” I was abandoned by my mother
November 20, 2025 at 2:05 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
understandable!!
quote from a Paris Review interview where Elaine Scarry says: There was someone in a graduate seminar who was very loquacious without really, in my view, saying anything--I mean really loquacious--and one day, without fully registering what I was doing, I punched him.
November 18, 2025 at 3:03 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
I like how this can be a five word horror story “this is not my cat” but it’s actually a true four word horror story “this is my life”
my black cat observing me for my daughter’s doorway its shadow elongated and stretching towards me
November 18, 2025 at 2:14 AM
toddedillard.bsky.social
what are we doing here
New York Times article with the lede "The more than 20,000 emails belonging to Jeffrey Epstein that lawmakers placed into the public domain last week are like a portal to a long-ago Manhattan power scene."
November 17, 2025 at 10:12 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
not LitHub doing my “who will miss Twitter the most” from 2023 but with an actual budget 😭
a bracket for who will miss Twitter the most with literary scolds beating out Joyce Carol Oates A huge literary bracket with references to popular lit twitter phenomena broken down into four distinct categories: existential crises, bad behavior, matters of taste, reading comprehension
November 17, 2025 at 9:02 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
my second poem in the latest issue of @lamplitmag.bsky.social!!!
Love Poem with Overwrought Similes Because That's As Close As I Can Get To Explaining It Right Now OK Lately every day I feel like I am peeling oranges while crying, like my fingers are cold-curled from missing the bus and walking home 3 miles on a day it wasn't supposed to snowand I just wanted something quick to eat while I thawed, but now it's like I'm 16 again and the orange is made of bra claspsbut also it's like I'm Heraclitus off his depression meds,like I'm certain the river can't be crossed twice because I'm going to drown. But then you hear the ice cream truck jangling like a train carrying only xylophones as cargo, and we sprint outside and wave down the truck like it's a ship and we've been wrecked on an island of Wednesdays for 14 years. We order the biggest ice creams on the menu, and our faces break into smiles like a child's laughter cartwheeling across a funeral home. We walk back holding vanilla cones aloft like a torches, we walk home like Friday lovers running into each other again at church, elbows nosing elbows like dolphins in love, the wind kiting a strand of your hair into my beard like when you are on top and your hair gets caught in my beard.
November 16, 2025 at 2:46 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
you ever try to sleep in but feel this weight pressing down on you
My cat sitting on my chest looking annoyed
November 16, 2025 at 12:54 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
NEW POEM ALERT! got a couple new ones in the latest issue of @lamplitmag.bsky.social. Here's the lamp-iest one :)
The Lampshade At the gates of heaven they said let's review: six snails eaten, but no burning buildings entered to save a child, a puppy, a mother's music box. You splashed into a dozen rivers, but many more you saw and never touched, never thought to touch. And yet, you spent most of your life working on this one species of looking. You'd see a wooden door and make a face from its knots and whorls. You'd find a dead cardinal and would wonder if the dead forget the color red first. Mostly we were impressed with this hat you made one night out of a lampshade. Your toddler laughed so hard he nearly lost his voice. After finishing his bedtime, you turned to go, and he told you to stay. We liked how he pulled an imaginary string dangling out of your nose. How you shut your eyes afterwards and lay perfectly motionless beside him. For years your son believed light is something you become. It's waiting, there, under your skin.
November 14, 2025 at 12:48 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
here's an old poem of mine that came out in @strangehorizons.bsky.social not long after I started writing poetry again
Young Monsters Watching a Sex-Ed Video By: Todd Dillard Issue: 7 May 2018 A girl sits in the back of the class— you will go through changes— her dragonfly wings flutter, shatter light. The taloned boy wonders— you may feel things, urges— who will ever want to hold his hand. The fanged, the tusked, the razor-horned sense the sadness that will come— this is natural—with learning to rein in their lips. You may have dreams— and they do, in their dreams they are naked and shadow-blued in front of a mirror—this happens to everyone—trying on different shapes, their reflection shaking its head no, the body a destination distanced by want.
November 12, 2025 at 12:44 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
good morning!
a picture of a knife being brandished at a cactus with the caption: “craft advice: get revenge on your poems when they hurt you”
November 11, 2025 at 12:42 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
finally found the difference between truth and beauty
a donkey next to a smiling dog wearing a headscarf shaped like donkey ears
November 10, 2025 at 1:37 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
We are legally obligated to keep these like this until winter sweeps the flowers away right
green zombie hands amidst green lush flower plants
November 7, 2025 at 9:35 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
I see a big account did you a favor by saving your mentions while also using your content
Joshua Friedman posting screenshots of Frances's first two skeets in this thread
November 3, 2025 at 5:28 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
everyone look at this t-rex cloud we I saw last night
a cloud that looks like a t-rex fossil above two houses
November 1, 2025 at 4:48 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
found this lil' fragment in the elephant graveyard of my abandon drafts and I kind of love it?
A stone doesn’t know it’s no longer a mountain. When you skip it across a lake, it thinks why is the sky doing this to itself? And when, finally, it sinks: Ah. Rain again.
October 31, 2025 at 8:53 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
when I say I feel the darkness pressing close I specifically mean ten pounds of darkness
my cat Kiki curled up inside the hoodie I am currently wearing
October 29, 2025 at 6:51 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
lol ok
Hello Todd Dillard, I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to take a moment to share some positive feedback on your book, Ways We Vanish. I must say, it’s a truly engaging and thought-provoking piece of work. The way you’ve conveyed your message with depth, clarity, and emotional resonance makes it both inspiring and impactful. Your writing has a natural rhythm that draws readers in and keeps them connected to every word, a sign of a genuine storyteller with purpose and passion. We’re genuinely impressed by the strength of your manuscript and the response it has the potential to create among readers. With that in mind, we’d love to collaborate further to expand your book’s reach through physical distribution to bookstores across the globe. This will give your work the visibility it deserves, connecting it with readers internationally and opening new promotional opportunities.
October 28, 2025 at 5:31 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
haven't seen this in my submittable inbox since before 2020
October 28, 2025 at 12:32 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
my childhood teddy bear Teddy McTed, which I gave to my daughter when she was 2, and every morning when I wake her up she’s holding it
a very love-worn teddy bear
October 27, 2025 at 12:25 AM
toddedillard.bsky.social
love love love this goodreads review of my chapbook :)
Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance! This chapbook, authored by Todd Dillard, is a gem. For me, it’s in my top three with Ubasute and This Tilting Earth. The poet, Dillard, weaves his way, with humor and apprehension, through a pandemic and being a girl-dad. His poems touch on uncharted times of a Covid plague and lockdown beside the struggles of life and fatherhood, all done with vibrant images. I had to read the first poem, “Pear Snow,” a few times. Thinking of the Helene floods in North Carolina, I traveled with him as the “air velvets / as if it’s going to rain,” and as he obliged the cadavers their wishes before returning them “back into their cradles.” Dillard’s work reveals him to be the king of enjambment as one grasps a line only to be startled by the first word of the next line. Midst the reference to Ragnarök, the Norse rebirth myth, each poem is skilled and stoic, no slacker poems here! “The Sadness of Horses” lets us “wade into the water to eat the moon.” The “Lighthouse” poem is devastating and tender; yes, both at once. And Dillard’s poems about his efforts to father a young daughter allow us to wander, sometimes fearful, into a world through a child’s untainted eyes of wonder as a father presses onward through unfamiliar places. Dillard shows us how we can “make a sky out of anything.” A chapbook worthy of one re-read after another. Thank you to the poet.
October 26, 2025 at 3:42 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
join me and my fellow locke-chinned and wolf-cheeked and stubble-lipped bards to raise a bunch of money for Trans Lifeline while hearing poems too
Flyer for the Bearded Bards of Bluesky online reading series to raise funds for Trans Lifeline November 8 Featuring Todd Dillard Brian Spears Matthew E. Henry James McConachie David J. Bauman Jonathan Everitt register at: beardedbardsofbluesky.weebly.com
October 25, 2025 at 1:14 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
this poem by Margaret Ross from @parisreview.bsky.social's daily poem email is absolutely killer, from the opening line all the way down

"Stop, it hurts me when you do that

How can it hurt you"
Orange Tree by Margaret Ross A ginkgo leaf like a splayed ass A begonia leaf is a pebbled surface green and burgundy A long and narrow leaf curls down All the different methods of extending yourself so the sun might better touch you Serrated edges of the teardrop nettle leaves sting your fingers The nursery labels everything and so assigns appearances to names I only know from fiction Old novels set in houses with gardens where the lovers meet or someone paces, thinking Jonquil and clematis Omniscient narrator conceived by a dead person From the limb of a sapling in a silver tub the photo of a future flower dangles by a plastic noose Years ago, you biked home with a leaf tucked under your helmet and taped it by its stem up on the door I try to force my soul up to the surface of my skin I try to send my mind into my mouth, into my hand to touch you with I repeat in my head the sentences I love you I love you more than anyone ever can and suck your cock repeating them You stood in the bathroom testing faces in the mirror while I lay in the next room pretending to read You could make soap balance on a round ledge The ragged flesh along your thumbs where you bite the skin off watching television Stop, it hurts me when you do that How can it hurt you On your knees, preparing surfaces stapling canvas over stretchers laying ground over the canvas You pour paint on wet gesso so the stain spreads slowly on its own and we can go get coffee Trying to get down under the immortal dailiness and touch the myth beneath the fiction We stayed one night with a couple I knew At dinner, the wife ate rice with us and the husband ate what looked like rice but was in fact minced cauliflower She set the bed up in the living room We’d go before they woke We fucked very quietly in the gray light Your fingers in my mouth and my body pressed against the firm hollow of the air mattress we knelt on to deflate When the hissing stopped, we folded it We stacked the pillows and the sheets We did everything you do to leave
October 25, 2025 at 12:30 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
RIP Ellen Bryant Voigt
The Bat By Ellen Bryant Voigt Reading in bed, full of sentiment for the mild evening and the children asleep in adjacent rooms, hearing them cry out now and then the brief reports of sufficient imagination, and listening at the same time compassionately to the scrabble of claws, the fast treble in the chimney— then it was out, not a trapped bird beating at the seams of the ceiling, but a bat lifting toward us, falling away. Dominion over every living thing, large brain, a choice of weapons— Shuddering, in the lit hall we swung repeatedly against its rising secular face until it fell; then shoveled it into the yard for the cat who shuttles easily between two worlds.
October 24, 2025 at 8:59 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
my new drafts meeting my over-edited poems
three hens looking through a window at a roasted chicken
October 24, 2025 at 1:02 PM
toddedillard.bsky.social
what is it about saving them as a pdf too
a stop sign with a fancy font, and a label beneath it that reads “stop putting your poems in Garamond instead of editing them”
October 22, 2025 at 12:13 PM