From the Writing Desk of Todd Dillard

I don't have a writing desk. 

OK, well, I do have a desk, but it's at the hospital where I work, so I can't say with much gusto that it's mine. It's the tan/gray of generic office furniture, a plastic veneer over particle board held upright by two gray-painted metal rectangles and domed by an overhead bin filled with to-be shredded paper, cough drops, various tea packets, and, currently, a weary-looking orange. It's furniture designed with less compelling aesthetics than a packing peanut, as functional as it is disposable. And I suppose I do write there, though mostly it's a transcription of sorts, lifting the notes I write in the middle of the night from my Notes App and plunking them onto a Google Doc during my lunch break for tinkering with on my commute home. 

Which is to say (ha!) my desk is always in transit because it is public transit. Here, for example, is what my bus looks like. The daylight is almost always this yolk-tinged blue—I'm always boarding when the sun crosses the horizon, either down or up, with slight variation (dimmer in the cold months, brighter in the warm) (1). My "desk" has plastic blue chairs (2). It has aluminum pillars (3). It has the hush and shuffle of passersby (4). It smells like coffee and fresh bread, like cold and mud rain, like weed and Listerine strips, like cigarettes and B.O. My "desk" computer is an iPhone 5S bulked up by a black, battered Otter Box. Everything I write is written and rewritten here as I sink into my seat, knees pressed against the metal back of the seat in front of me, Philadelphia's 69th Street Station approaching slowly or fading away. 90% of my poems, were you to transpose them onto a blank Google Doc, would have lines that are shorter than a phone screen's margin. (I often wonder if my poems are less stylized because my page is roughly two inches wide.)

At my "desk" I sometimes have a printed packet across my lap, usually poems by people to whom I provide feedback, though sometimes it's a craft essay or every single piece I can find online for a particular poet or every poem from a lit mag's (could be any of them) new online issue. 90% of the time I have a single book with me, most recently George Saunders' "Tenth of December," though more often than not I am reading poetry. (Today I brought Tom Lux's "New and Selected" on a whim.) 

There's something about a bus, or a subway, that for me lends itself to writing. I think it's because it's a horrible place to write. I just rarely have the time to mess around, so I have to really reach the meat of the thing, or abandon it for the next commute, or abandon it completely after trying for a hundred miles. 

I also occasionally edit poems on my couch, which isn't pictured here, because it's less interesting, IKEA-made and a harmless blue. Next to it there's a bin of cords and remotes for my television and PlayStation 4, as well as a scattering of books I have on hand because sometimes I need to read something, it doesn't matter what, anything will do. I only edit here from about 11:00pm-11:45pm most week nights, or sometimes when my wife is watching one of her shows and I am preparing a submission packet or grappling with a specific poem. 

At first I thought perhaps I was my desk, but I don't think that's true. I like to think a desk brings some kind of order to a writer's practice, and that's just not who I am. My desk is a route. It's pre-dawn jay-walking across the Westchester Pike. The banana the nurse hands the homeless man outside the train station. The teenagers sunbathing on the roof of a West Philadelphia apartment. The rain slopping down the subway stairs. The elderly woman who once read my book over my shoulder and, as we got off the train, apologized for "stealing my reading." My desk is too loud and too big and too full. But I wouldn't have finished a book, or even been able to write more than a few poems, without it.

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Todd Dillard’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Best New Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, Electric Literature, Nimrod, Superstition Review, and Split Lip Magazine. 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 anthologies. He is a recipient of the Birdwhistle Poetry Prize. His debut collection “Ways We Vanish” will be coming out in 2020 from Okay Donkey Press.