trash to treasure literary

“This poem placed third in in a category of the MA State Poetry Society contest, 2024. The subject was “a magical journey to an enchanted place” I’d just written this poem not long before and hadn’t sent it anywhere. Usually if you win a state contest they publish the poem somewhere but the person I contacted in Massachusetts said they don’t publish the winning poems at all. Now it’s kind of stuck in the middle of out there but not out the’re. Not published, but not exactly unpublished. I hate to think Coastline of My Mind will be left out.”

“waiter-customer confidentiality: I've been trying to pull together separate customer interactions from my last service job into one poem. I think they all deserve separate poems, but this was my first attempt at consolidation. litany to the animal parts: I wrote this after a breakup and then I got embarrassed about it and didn't want to look at it anymore!!! stop falling in love with white people: I've only ever truly fallen in love with white people, and I've wanted to write about how weird and bad that makes me feel for forever. This poem was one of my first attempts, which was frustrating in that I wanted to talk about everything and feel like I succeeded in very little.”

“Both of these poems, ‘mantra’ and ‘squash’, have been collecting dust for some time now. I gave up on them, not because I don’t like them, but because it seems no one else does. They’ve both received handfuls of rejections from different magazines/journals, one said: ‘For the amount of space it takes up, it doesn't end up saying a whole lot.’ But I think maybe they just weren’t looking hard enough. I love these pieces—the space they take up, their ambiguity, their emptiness, their mundanity, all of it. Maybe I’m biased and I’m seeing things that aren’t there, but I hope someone else can read these poems and feel the things I felt when I wrote them, the things I feel when I re-read them again.”

“I originally deleted this piece because I was ashamed of the way I felt when I wrote it. I want to be a good, respectful person who portrays healthy relationships in her writing, and I felt like the way I portrayed my attraction as destructive and love as something you can win didn’t line up with those goals. But I think it’s very human to have thoughts and feelings that don’t align with the person you want to be, so I’m giving the piece a second chance.”

“i trashed these pieces because they felt like cutting my heart out and showing the world my raw, bleeding chest, empty and unbandaged. i didn’t have the resolve to stitch myself back up without once again drowning in gore. or in other words, i couldn’t edit them into coherent strings of words without losing myself in the emotion i wrote them with. so they stayed buried at the bottom of my poetry document, messy and loose and raw. until now!!!”