Zombie Extras Visit 7-11

Every night they return,
tripping down the hill
in tattered t-shirts,
hospital gowns flapping,
glucose syrup glistening red
across their chins and throats.
They seem tired of this death
as they pour hazelnut coffees
and buy boxes of Sour Patch Kids
and chat about what they’ll do
once they get back to living:
exfoliate the earth off their arms,
maybe hold their baby niece, or gnaw
a porterhouse steak to the bone.
They talk about the way they died
today: crossbow bolt, gatling gun.
One shows off the tread marks on his blazer
where he was flattened by a tank.
And when one of the dead gets a text,
she winces at her phone's bright light—
“They started filming again,” she groans. 
“This is why,” one says, “we call the dead 
‘late’.” It’s a steep climb, going back. 
The dead hold onto each other 
in case one of them slips.

Plague

The grackle in the living room knocks
itself senseless against rafters,

then crash lands onto
one of the family pharynxes.

If I opened a window, I know
more grackles would hurtle inside.

Instead, I’ve become a magician.
I trap the grackle in a tissue

then hold the tissue up
for the audience to inspect.

Where bird should be: red
freckling, a star map plotted by Ares.

Then it appears, erupting
from my son’s chapped lips.

For my next trick, I ask the audience
to close their eyes.

When they open them
again it's 3am.

The God of Thieves

The moon is a white bowl
the God of Children Finally Asleep
has given me to dry.
My only towel is your hair.
Did I mention I want a divorce
from all the hours that are no longer
ours, ones spent descaling faucets,
brooming down those spiderwebs
that I’ve never seen with spiders?
There was this video of a man being robbed
while he was filling his truck up with gas:
he aimed the pump's nozzle at the thieves
and soaked them—and doesn’t that stink
how his safety still cost the man four dollars
in free-flowing unleaded? It's crazy
how there's a price to everything
and yet we encourage our children
to dream. A horse is always in reach
if you kids really want it, we might say.
But we’ll never buy a horse.
We can barely afford to furnish
our cobwebs with arachnids.
And now there’s moon all in your hair.
There’s no telling if it will stain
or fade after a few rinses.
If someone tried to rob me of this life
I’d tell them how much I love you.
I’d soak them in it. They would run
stinking back to their homes
and pray to the God of Thieves
for luck or peace or the kind of soap
that can get anything out,
including a lifetime of regrets.
The God of Thieves would shrug
and, just as I turned off our lamp,
he’d swipe the light off your nape.






Todd Dillard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, Southern Review, Waxwing, Pleiades, and The Adroit Journal. His collection Ways We Vanish was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award, and his chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance is available from Variant Literature. A finalist for the 2025 Donald Hall AWP Poetry Prize, Todd Dillard lives in Philadelphia, PA, and works as a writer for a hospital.

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