The Good Literary Citizen Pays Fees to be Murdered by MFA Assassins
Your poems do not fit what we are looking for; a big fat NO,
Your turns don’t fit our editorial needs; are too dark and mismatched;
The feel for us is not quite right for our tastes; bitter, wrong,
And your iambs misbehave, connote controversy, are unfit,
And, like a crow caw, do not resonate with us. We refuse,
Scrap your epistrophe, as it is not MFA enough. Signed Mr. Reject.
I chafe with each Rattle and Ploughshares rejection
Whose esteem assassins carry MFA calling cards? Their No,
Questions about my public-school syntax. I’m easy to refuse.
Player-hating screeners feign colorblindness, my words, mismatch
Theirs; camouflage Black skin and render my voice unfit.
What’s the point? Nigga, please. I’m no imposter, and Jim Crow feels wrong.
Your ‘Guinea Pig Insurrection’ piece for Driftwood Press is wrong.
Sorry to disappoint you. Take heart: even Poe was rejected.
Will The Paris Review slush-pile readers consider my work unfit,
Shrink my heart, droop my shoulders, try and defeat my soul? No,
Thank you to Troublemaker, who did not curb-kick as mismatched
Texarkana Arkansas Slaughter Procedures and Barbeque or refuse
Me. The Opiate loved T-45 Contagion and did not refuse
Me. Some know better what people like and crush systemic wrongs.
I can’t be erased if not published: Invisible means mismatched.
I cannot be burned or torn off shelves if censored by rejection
Like Hopkins, Atwood, Sapphire, Kaur, Morrison, and Angie Thomas, no,
10,000 hours earns me a book ban notice; let me be unfit.
This is from a murder of crows: We chose other work. Yours does not fit
And we regret, after careful review, decline and refuse
Further consideration, even though we enjoyed your work, so—no,
Unfortunately, we are going to pass. Please don’t take us wrong
As our bluest editing eye favors our stories and reject
What’s political, makes us feel bad, or is point-of-view mismatched.
This life is short, and writing takes so long to learn to be mismatched.
I sling verse like David did barite to Goliath’s skull when judged unfit
By trained readers whose flawed vision and emails hemorrhage rejection.
I shock the braincase and crow lines to cure myopia when refused
And bury white lies between rocks and hard places when wronged.
My village is prose worthy, but to be whitewashed? HELL NO.
MFA readers sip Red Bull, text, circle jerk, and reject as unfit
The mix of purple veggies on plastic plates; refuse the mismatched,
The colors of peppers and carrots and their NO by default rubs me wrong.
RON L. DOWELL wrote Watts UpRise, a poetry collection released by World Stage Press in 2022. A very public love letter to Watts, Los Angeles, the collection honors its most notable artistic landmark, the Watts Towers, and its creator, Sabato Rodia. Watts UpRise is a finalist for the 2022 Press 53 Award for Poetry, and a featured poem, “Compton, An Energy-Fueled Dark Star,” was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. Ron’s poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, North Dakota Quarterly, The Wax Paper, Kallisto Gaia Press, The Penmen Review, Packingtown Review-Journal, and The Poeming Pigeon.
Grand Little Things 