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.

 

Todd Dillard’s work has previously appeared in Guernica, Waxwing, Adroit Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and Sixth Finch. His debut collection Ways We Vanish (Okay Donkey Press) was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. He is a Poetry Editor for The Boiler Journal, and lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife and two kids.