I Submitted the Same Poem Eleven Times
Ten editors passed; the eleventh called it unforgettable.
I keep a spreadsheet of my rejections the way some people keep an aquarium: something to stare at when I need to feel calm about drowning. Eleven rows of it belong to a single poem, and those eleven rows took twenty-six months of my life.
The poem is called 'Float.' It is about my father teaching me to swim in the grey sea off Gopalpur when I was seven, his hands under my back, his voice saying 'I have you, I have you,' and the afternoon I realized his hands were gone and I was floating alone... and had been for some time. I wrote it the month after his diagnosis, when I was thirty-four and suddenly doing that math all children eventually do.
It began, embarrassingly, as homework. A prompt I found one insomniac night said: write about a body of water and a person who cannot swim in it anymore. I typed the first draft in forty minutes with my heart going like a wasp in a jar, and I remember thinking, with the arrogance of 2 a.m., that it was the best thing I had ever made.
Submission one went to the biggest magazine I could think of, the one whose spine sits face-out in bookshops. Six months of silence... then a form letter: 'Thank you for the opportunity to read your work. It is not for us at this time.' Not for us. As if the poem had shown up to the wrong dinner party in the wrong shoes.
Submissions two through four came back faster. One was a form letter with my name spelled wrong. One arrived on Christmas Eve, which I choose to believe was a scheduling accident and not editorial sadism. One had a single word added in pen at the bottom: 'Close.' I stared at that word for longer than I have stared at some paintings.
Submission five changed everything, though it took me a year to admit it. An editor at a small coastal journal sent two sentences: 'There is real water in this. But the ending flinches.'
The ending flinches. I was furious for a week. I read the note out loud to my sister in the voice of a cartoon villain. I taped it to the wall above my desk specifically to hate it. The ending did not flinch, I told the wall. The ending was subtle.
The ending flinched.
In the last four lines, right where the poem needed to say the true thing, I had swerved into a tasteful metaphor about tides, the poetic equivalent of changing the subject. Because the true thing was not that my father let go of me in the water. The true thing, which I had never said to anyone, was that I saw his hands leave and said nothing, because I wanted to know if I could do it alone, and some part of me has been ashamed of that wanting my whole life. Around that time I read an essay about why safe poems lose, and it used the exact word: flinch. A poem, it said, gets judged by the moment it looks away.
Between rejections seven and eight, on a Tuesday, in one sitting, I rewrote the last four lines. No tides. Just the sentence I had been swimming around for twenty-seven years.
I let go first.
Rejections eight, nine, and ten still came, because the universe does not become a screenwriter just because you had a breakthrough. But they came back different. Handwritten postscripts. 'Not this one, but send more.' One editor rejected the poem and asked, in the same breath, whether it had a sibling. Somewhere in there I also entered it into a monthly poetry contest, where it did not place, and a stranger in the community voting left a comment that said only: 'the ending. oh no. the ending.' I printed that comment. Rejection ten and 'oh no the ending' are taped to the same wall, four inches apart, and between them is everything I know about this vocation.
Submission eleven I almost did not send. Twenty-six months is long enough to grow a whole new fear... the fear that persistence has quietly turned into delusion, that resubmitting rejected work is just grief with postage. I sent it on my father's birthday, mostly as a ritual, the way you light a lamp.
Nineteen days later an editor named Carol wrote to say she had read 'Float' four times on a train and missed her stop once. She used the word unforgettable. She quoted the last line back to me, the new one, the true one, and said, 'Do not ever let anyone talk you out of that ending.'
Then I looked at the masthead, and this is the part I still tell people slowly, so they understand I am not inventing it.
It was the same magazine as submission one.
The big one. The bookshop spine. A new editor had taken over poetry eighteen months earlier. The desk was the same desk... The reader had changed.
A rejection is not a verdict on the poem. It is a timestamp: not this desk, not this month, not this particular tired reader on this particular Tuesday.
I want to be careful here, because the moral of this story is not 'never change anything and wear them down.' Ten of those eleven submissions carried a poem with a flinch in it, and nine editors were right to pass, whether they knew why or not. The eleventh submission was the fourth or fifth genuinely different animal to travel under the same title. Persistence did half the work. The other half was done at the desk, on a Tuesday, by finally writing about my family the way it happened instead of the way I could bear it.
The magazine came out in spring. I drove the printed copy to my father, who is slower now but still entirely himself, and read it to him at the kitchen table while his tea went cold. He listened with his eyes shut. When I finished the last line, the one about letting go first, he was quiet for a long time...
'You remember it wrong,' he said finally. 'I never let go. You kicked away from me.'
We sat with that. Two witnesses, one afternoon, no referee. Fifty yards of grey water between our versions and no way back to measure.
'Then it is a poem about both of us being wrong,' I said, and my father, who has never once used the word poem in my presence without suspicion, nodded as if that were the only definition of the form he had ever needed.
The spreadsheet is still on my laptop. Row eleven is filled in green. I never deleted the ten red rows above it, and I never will, because that column of red is not a record of failure.
It is a flight of stairs, photographed from the top.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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