“This is one of those pieces that I wrote more for me than anyone else and it felt private and also very out of context and stupid at a time. Now I feel like it can fit in here.”

“This was a thought exercise I found too funny to delete and now it is poetry I guess.”

“I often trash this piece because it was an early piece of mine and not in my typical mode of voice, but I think it’s important to still use and acknowledge it because it shows where I came from as a writer compared to now. Moreso, this poem talks about a very common thing, fire, in a strange way and I don’t feel as it lives up to other works on the topic.”

“This piece was much more successful than "Ennui." Four editors mentioned they liked the piece. But I trashed it because I felt this poem could not stand on its own (as it is not meant to stand on its own— I am including it in an honors thesis). And, of course, this is not even to mention the self-consciousness this piece engenders in me because of its strident, confessional tone.”

“I considered this piece a failure after an editor called my writing "maudlin, sentimental, and choked by a syrupy romanticism." While it took me a while to work on this piece, it did not succeed as well as I anticipated. The piece is highly narrative, personal, and confessional. It's hard for me to own up to it because of the negative feedback I received. Ultimately, I trashed it because I thought it had an immature and undeveloped voice.”

TW* sexual violence

“I actually wrote this poem as a catharsis of sorts and later submitted it to a zine as well. After the rejection, I felt that the parallels I made with a dismantled  shrine and an abused  body might have been too generic and could have been framed better. Either way, I tried to reflect back and reshape the piece but was unable to omit anything which is why it has been lost in my ms word app until now.”

“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.”

“I tried to be nostalgic. In touch with the past and nature. I didn’t love this. It felt like pandering to someone else’s view of my own home. It got rejected somewhere less than 24 hours after I submitted. How can you reject what my home looks like? Writing brings joy. I can’t imagine giving it up. I hate this rollercoaster and I want to get off this ride but I know as soon as I do I’ll just end up buying another ticket again.”

“This has been sitting in my drafts for a few months now. I can’t bring myself to edit it but I love it too much to delete it. You can say I probably don’t even have the will to do anything with it. Sometimes I feel like I have trouble communicating so when the words leave my brain they are incorrect on the page and when you read them you don’t get the full scope of what I meant to say. That’s a whole long rambling way of saying, I’ve gotten too many rejections from other pieces, this one just felt like using someone else’s voice in order to gain approval except what I mean to say is I miss being passionate about things and this is my voice and I hate that it seems like I have to share only pain to be accepted and still end up being rejected. Many writers say they experienced tons of rejection before they made it so it seems like leaving the industry isn’t an option for me either.”

“I sometimes imagine myself reading my poems before a raised platform upon which stand my favourite dead authors. Sometimes they approve of my poems. At others, they either laugh or frown. I vaguely remember Nakahara Chūya leaving the room right after I finished reading this one.”

“They were written recently, during my holidays to recover from depression. The time wasn’t right to put word to paper, and I usually write full manuscripts, with a concept in mind. For those, I didn’t have that. That’s why they’re homeless now and I don’t like that idea.”

“I find this poem rubbish, it's entirely unnecessary to compare a diary entry to a poem so I chewed the paper. I didn't. This was lying somewhere in my notes, typical trash poetry.”

“As with many of my prior writings this poem was written about a boy. I edited it a few times but never could settle on a final draft. I finally just emailed it to myself and forgot it existed. Although it isn’t a personal favorite, it still made me smile when I found it in my cluttered little writing file. The boy might be gone, but the words live on.”

“I simply forgot why I wrote the first poem. It became completely new and distant, sitting silently in my Google Docs. Perhaps the poem was about me talking to myself. Reason for both of the poems: I feel that I wrote too much of the same subject, the same muse. I'm scared that this won't be worthy because of that. My brain automatically said: ‘Repetition. Boring. Short (although my poems are mostly short). These won't make it. These are so ugly.’”

“I trashed this story because my first alpha reader didn't like it and honestly I'm not even sure why I wrote it. It seemed like a fun story in my head, but it might just be a bit too nihilistic.”

“To ‘trash’ this piece broke my heart a bit. It was rejected by every lit mag it has been submit to since first writing it in 2020. I’m quite happy with this poem not because I think it’s my best work but because it captures a vulnerable time in my life. I wrote this poem for myself and only myself, not trying to meet guidelines or make it easy to understand; my goal was expression. And I will keep working to find a home for this little weird poem.”

“This poem relates some of the experience I had, distracting my 5 year old daughter, shortly before the loss of my stepfather. I was writing to the future me - trying to help her understand the depth of loss she was feeling and yet also see how deeply it fits into the cycles of the world - that the daughter on her lap would one day be within that cycle as well. I wanted future me to understand how precious that moment was. I wrote that poem about fifteen years ago, revised it significantly, and still have never sent it out - as it never, really, feels as though it invites a reader into the experience. It is a simple and private moment, one perhaps more fit for a personal journal than a publication.”

“This poem relates an experience I had in the early 2000s, when I came out from work to find a dead Canada goose on the ground by my car. People drove around it and seemed unphased by its presence and I was paralyzed by the image - the seeming uselessness of the moment, so I tried to work through it in a poem. The poem never felt finished, as I think I wanted the poem itself to provide me with explanation or a feeling of closure and, unfortunately, it never did.”

“I normally write fiction, not poetry. This came to me largely fully formed, and in a voice I wouldn't normally write in. It doesn't fit well within the broader canon of my work, and I didn't try hard enough to find a home for it before giving up and relegating it to the dustbin of scrapped pieces. My short fiction has appeared in Luna Station Quarterly and JAKE and is upcoming in Cloves Literary (Nov 2022) and The Bitchin' Kitsch (Jul 2023).”