"What the Husband Keeps" by Todd Dillard

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What the Husband Keeps

by Todd Dillard

from Issue 20 of Stanchion Magazine

There was that time you went blind driving on 85.

I grabbed the wheel, we coasted down the offramp

to one of those anonymous office centers—it was

Saturday, so it was just us and the blackness

that swallowed your vision. "What's happening?" I asked.

But you said to wait. You described stars bursting,

light crumbling the dark's edges. And just as suddenly

you could see again. I asked if I should drive

but you said you were fine, you drove us back

to our Bronx apartment with its cornflower

blue bedroom walls, its raspberry entryway,

our neighbor Two Feathers and his 2am drum circles.

Thirteen years later I reminded you about this

and you gave me this look. You said you didn't

remember. The parking lot, its sad dogwoods,

its disintegrating black top--I described it, and you shook

your head. For years I thought of the buttered bread

I might have needed to place into your palm,

the different ways to say "red" so you wouldn't

miss an inch of autumn, a slice of velvet cake.

The darkness that happened to you once, briefly,

it happened to me for years. That blackness—

you dropped it—I picked it up for you, I polished it,

tucked it like a passport into my nightstand drawer.

All this time, I kept it safe. This is how

I love you. I will wipe the shadows from your brow.

I will fold them into our dictionary's pages

between "ember" and "embrace."

Todd Dillard's work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Adroit Journal, Waxwing, Poet Lore, HAD, Guernica, and The Threepenny Review. His debut book Ways We Vanish was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. Dillard's chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance was published by Variant Literature in 2024. His work was selected as a finalist for the 2018 “Best Small Fictions” anthology and has been nominated numerous times for the “Best of the Net” and the Pushcart Prize. This poem, "What the Husband Keeps," was nominated for a Pushcart this year. Find him on Blue Sky.