“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).”

“I scrapped this poem because, for a long time, it was the single neglected poem in my submissions roster. I wrote it in a flurry of heartfelt enthusiasm and put an enormous amount of effort into the environmental metaphors, hoping to evoke the rural Manitoba of my childhood. But, since I don't normally write poems, I didn't know what to do with it, and then, before I knew it, it was old and didn't meet my standards anymore.”

 “I gave this poem up after a couple of rejections because all I heard was that it was too personal. There wasn't enough context that would make my family's story make sense. That while the words were good, it was hard to connect with. I felt like giving more context would ruin what I was trying to write about, so I just let it sit untouched.”