The Longlist That Felt Like a Throne
Number thirty-one of thirty-five, and I celebrated like a laureate.
There were thirty-five names on the longlist and mine was thirty-first, which is why I bought a cake.
Not a slice. A whole cake.
The kind with a plastic dome and a sticker that says CELEBRATION in a font that has never known doubt. The teenager at the bakery counter asked what the occasion was and I said, "I came in thirty-first," and she said, "Congratulations?" with a question mark I chose not to hear.
Let me back up.
For two years I had been submitting poems the way people feed parking meters: regularly, joylessly... with a growing suspicion that the machine was broken. I kept a spreadsheet of my submissions.
Forty-one rows. Forty-one rejections.
I had named the file The Wall of No, because if you cannot win, you can at least have excellent folder structure.
The rejections had a house style. "We received an exceptional number of entries." "We regret." "We encourage you to submit again," which, by the fifteenth time, reads less like encouragement and more like a gym membership you cannot cancel.
The poem that broke the streak was never supposed to exist. It came from a prompt I clicked one Sunday night mostly to avoid answering emails: write about a light you can see from your window. My window faces the backs of eleven other buildings, a view no postcard has ever wanted. But there is one kitchen window across the alley that stays lit until three in the morning, every single night, with a stranger standing in it, stirring something. I wrote about him. I called him a lighthouse keeper for no ships.
I revised it twice, entered it into a monthly poetry contest, added row forty-two to the spreadsheet... and forgot it the way you forget a lottery ticket in a coat pocket.
The email came on a Wednesday at 2:14 p.m. I was at work, in a meeting about whether we were having too many meetings. Subject line: Longlist Announcement. I read the first line under the table, then excused myself and walked to the bathroom holding my phone flat in both hands, like a tray of something spillable.
I locked the stall and read it properly. Thirty-five poems longlisted out of more than two thousand entries. The names were listed alphabetically but numbered anyway, because somebody in charge apparently enjoys suffering. There I was... Number thirty-one.
I did the math right there in a bathroom stall: top two percent.
I want to be honest about what happened to my body. My ears went hot. My eyes did the shameful thing. A colleague in the next stall asked if I was okay and I said, "I'm on a longlist," and she said, "Feel better," which, in fairness, was a reasonable response to a stranger's voice announcing that through a partition.
Here is what nobody teaches you: rejection comes with a full routine. You know the moves. Close the email, exhale through your nose, say something brave to the kettle. But small good news arrives with no protocol at all. There is no card for it. No one makes anything that says, "You were not dismissed immediately."
So I invented a protocol. Cake first. Then I called my mother, which became its own comedy routine. "So you won?" No, Ma. "Shortlisted?" No, Ma. Longlisted. "So what did you get?" Nothing, Ma. Nothing at all. I got read. She went quiet for a second... and then said, "Well. Finally somebody has taste," and that, your honor, is why she receives the first slice of everything for the rest of my life.
That night I carried the cake up to the roof of my building. This sounds more cinematic than it was: our roof has a forest of antennae and one plastic chair that belongs to no one. But the city was doing its thing. The whole skyline had switched itself on, thousands of lit windows stacked into the dark, and I stood there with a plastic fork and felt, absurdly, that all of it was applause. Every window a hand clapping. Somewhere in that glitter was my three a.m. stranger, stirring his pot, not knowing he was now literature.
Nobody warns you that hope arrives in installments, and that you are allowed to throw a full party for a partial payment.
Two weeks later the shortlist came out, and I was not on it.
I braced for the crash. I had drafted the sad text to my friends in advance, the way you keep an umbrella by the door.
And then the strangest thing happened: the crash never came.
I read the ten shortlisted names, felt one clean pinch of envy, admired two of the titles against my will... and went to make dinner. The party, it turned out, had already happened. Nobody could repossess the roof, or the cake, or my mother's sentence.
Prize or no prize, I posted the poem on a community wall for poets that same week. A stranger commented that she also watches a late window across her alley, in a city I have never visited, and that she had started calling her stranger the night baker. So now we are two people on opposite sides of a map, guarding lighthouses for no ships. Show me the trophy that does that.
Here is my theory, and it took me forty-two spreadsheet rows to earn it. We treat writing like a ladder where only the top rung counts as standing. Winner or nothing. But whatever this life is, it is actually built out of thirty-firsts. Almosts. Longlists. The editor who scribbles "close, send more" on a form rejection. The friend who asks to hear the new one twice. Small wins are not the consolation prize of a writing life. They are the currency of it, and I had been refusing to cash them for two years because they were not printed in large enough denominations.
The spreadsheet has a second tab now. It is called The Wall of Almost, and it has exactly one glorious highlighted row, and adding that tab changed how every other row reads. Forty-one noes stopped being a verdict and became a running start.
People ask if I have won anything since... Reader, I have not. The rejections continue at their usual cruising altitude; the count is somewhere in the sixties now, and some of them still sting like a paper cut in lemon week. But I enter differently. I used to submit poems the way you throw a message off a cliff. Now I submit them the way you wave at a neighbor: expecting nothing, glad to be seen occasionally.
These days, when a rejection lands, I go up to the roof anyway. Same chair that belongs to no one, same skyline. The city does not know the difference between my good news and my bad news. It stays lit either way.
Some nights that feels like indifference.
Most nights it feels like the biggest longlist there is: a million windows, every one of us numbered, every one of us somehow still on it, still lit at an unreasonable hour, still stirring something.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.