Submit by Alorah Welti
Write. Edit. Add another line, another stanza.
Make like a vulture and harvest words
from your long-dead poems. Write.
Cut what won’t work. Watch it bleed.
Edit. Let it sit. Read it
out loud. Read it before bed.
Wipe your possessive fingerprints off of it.
Work on it until it stops wanting to change.
Finalize it in your mind. Call it done.
Lay it out in a .docx for readers, editors. Lay down.
Wait. Submit it with others,
submit it alone. Wait. Get it rejected.
Call it declined so you don’t feel rejected.
Read more guidelines than poems. Fill forms.
Submit it to a contest. Make it simultaneous.
Send it two, four, six months into the future to find a decision.
Get it accepted. Oh my god. Thank you.
Let it live there like glory.
Now—Write another.
Start again.
“I trashed this piece because it isn’t in my normal style. It’s so literal, so cut and dry, and I thought maybe people would relate to it since there are so many writers in the grind of submitting, but no one has accepted it or really liked it. I do enjoy the staccato of reading it out loud though, so I haven’t given up on it completely.”
Alorah Welti (she/her) is a Minnesota-born feminist, synesthete, poet, and artist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Allium, Cutbow Quarterly, lavender bones, Lit. 202, and elsewhere. She lives on stolen Mohican and Wabanaki land in Massachusetts with her family. Her Twitter is @alorahsky.