When It Rains

I submit a lot. I keep track of all those poems going out and back in a color-coded, detailed, obsessive compulsive playground of an excel sheet. My motto has always been to send much and expect nothing, and to treat the few lucky strikes I've had as merely bonuses. Whenever I get a rejection letter, all it means is that I get to log it into said excel sheet. Although never as much as I do now, I've been sending work out since I was fifteen (a short murder mystery out to the Alfred Hitchcock Award; never heard back from them).

But in all my days of sending work out and having all but a handful of it come back, I've never had so much work rejected in a single 24-hour period.  Starting at around six in the evening and ending with the post woman's arrival around four in the afternoon the next day, I got six rejection letters. It's as if the editors of the world got together and decided to clean out their managers on March 17th. If Saint Patrick can clear Ireland of all its snakes, then by golly so could they.

It may sound like I'm whining, but really, I think it's hilarious. In fact, I was hoping for more. I did get some good news from Washington Square to break up the monotony, which is great because it's a journal I really like and it's a poem that I'm fond of.

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In non-poetry news, Brandon & I just got back from a Spring Break trip to Asheville, NC. What a great town! We got to do some hiking, a bit of day-time drinking (don't get me wrong: we drank at night, too), ate lots of vegan food, and spend some time with one of my greatest friends whom I hadn't seen in eighteen months. A nice trip indeed.