Rejection Slips

by Laurie Byro


Dear Poetess: (we are a male dominated publishing house. We save Poet for
the genuine masculine pronoun, writer for the transitional “all others.”)

Thank you for your enthusiastic 8 poem submission to Ovid Quarterly (we prefer
3 poems and stop reading after 2 strophes) and while we were riveted on your

New-age feminist posies, especially the brilliant “Hot Flash in the Time of Trump”
I am afraid for this moment in time (and any future moment of this Presidency)

we are allowing them more time to mature (although the word fester certainly
comes to mind.) A more suitable period um otical, (journal is the better word,

we thinks) would be "Fiorello Power, Little Flowers, big noises" or even
“Off Kilter—a handbook for the criminally insane.” Fear not, you were not among

the slush pile, but we do receive a daily drizzle of nasty submissions
that are sometimes even more alarming than yours.

We are grateful for a slightly more conservative approach and so perhaps
your subscription to “The National Review” has expired? (Naughty girl, wakey wakey.)

We DO encourage you to purchase our journal (why not capitalize on desperation?)
and please feel free to resubmit 3 poems in 3 months (making it easy for you to remember Sweetness). We feel strongly additional poems from you will allow us time to reconsider

(and possibly to forgive and forget.) As ever, best

(wishes that you will have one or more psychiatric evaluations, or better still pen
a manuscript entitled “Get Thee To A Nuttery: How the Bard and Freud veered

my poetry to the right”) we remain your waiting with bated breath editors,
forever ready and eager with a red pen, a red cap, and a very-wide red tie.

PS—We can’t promise a personal note each and every time, Cupcake, but with this entry?
YOU have inspired us.


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Laurie Byro has seven collections of poetry published, most recently: Hopeless Romance, (Cholla Needles Arts), Deux & Other Sorrows and La Dogaressa and Other Poems (Cowboy Buddha Press). Four books of poetry were published prior to this, among them Gertrude Stein's Salon and Other Legends (Blue Horse Press) and The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities (Kelsay Books): both contain work that received a New Jersey Poetry Prize. Laurie lives in New Jersey with her husband where she has been facilitating Circle of Voices poetry discussion in New Jersey libraries the last 23 years.