The Loss That Got Me Published
I lost the contest; a judge quietly sent my poem to her editor.
The rejection arrived at 6:14 on a Tuesday morning, and I read it standing at the kitchen counter with a spoon of peanut butter in my mouth.
"We received a record number of entries this year." Every losing writer knows this sentence. It is the sound of a door closing so politely you almost thank it. The poem was called "What My Father Kept in His Coat Pockets," and I had entered it into a monthly poetry contest because my friend Dana dared me to stop hoarding my poems like tinned food for an apocalypse that was never coming.
It did not place.
Not first. Not third. Not the shortlist, not the longlist, not the honorable mentions tacked on at the bottom like consolation raisins in an oatmeal cookie.
I closed the laptop and went to work. I told no one, because there was nothing to tell. "I lost a thing you never knew I entered" is not a conversation... It is a confession.
Here is what the poem was about, since you were not one of the judges. My father died in November, two years ago now, and in December my mother asked me to take his coats to the donation bin behind the church. Six coats.
I went through the pockets first, because you do. I found a receipt for two coffees from a diner that closed in 2009. A single glove, child sized, that belonged to none of us. A guitar pick, though he never played. Half a roll of peppermints, fused by years and rain into one long peppermint.
I stood in the church parking lot crying over a fossilized peppermint, and then I went home and wrote about it, because for the first time in my life I was writing toward the grief instead of around it.
The poem was quiet. No fireworks, no clever turn in the last line, no vocabulary that needed a dictionary. Just a man's pockets, itemized, the way loss actually arrives: as inventory.
It lost, and I understood why it lost, or I told myself I did. I had once read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I spent a whole weekend wondering if mine had been safe. I decided it was worse than safe. It was small. Small loses to loud in almost every room on earth.
Three months went by... Winter gave up. I wrote other things and hoarded them again, Dana's dare notwithstanding.
Then, on a Thursday in March, an email arrived from a name I did not recognize, with a subject line that made my stomach do something complicated: "Your poem, via Miriam Okafor."
I did not know a Miriam Okafor. I assumed it was a scam, one of those schemes that flatters writers into paying four hundred dollars to appear in an anthology no one will ever shelve. I nearly deleted it... I want to be honest about that. The most important email of my writing life spent four hours sitting one click from the trash.
The sender was an editor at a literary journal that had rejected me twice, in the ordinary way, through the ordinary door. She wrote that one of her longtime contributors, a poet named Miriam Okafor, had served as a judge in a contest that spring and had asked the organizers for permission to share one entry that had not won anything.
The entry was mine.
"Miriam does not do this," the editor wrote. "In eleven years she has sent me exactly one poem. It is yours, and I would like to publish it."
I read the email four times... Then I called Dana, who screamed. Then I called my mother, who asked, gently, which poem it was, and went very quiet when I told her, and then said, "He kept the strangest things," in a voice that was doing its best.
The poem ran in the summer issue. My name in a real table of contents, printed between two poets I had studied in school. But that is not the part of the story I keep returning to.
The part I keep returning to is this: a woman I had never met read more than six hundred contest entries, was obligated to rank them, ranked mine below at least a dozen others, and then, when the ranking was done and her duty was fully discharged, went out of her way to keep a losing poem alive. There was no prize for her in it... No fee. No public credit, since the judging was anonymous.
Just a person with a little bit of power spending the leftover crumbs of it on a stranger.
I wrote to her eventually, through the editor, a thank-you note I revised more times than I had revised the poem itself. She replied ten days later. Three sentences, typed like a telegram by someone who has no time to waste and therefore wastes none of yours. I have the reply printed and folded in my desk drawer, and I am quoting the middle sentence with her blessing:
Contests count votes, but readers count wounds. Your poem lost the vote and won the wound, and the wound is the career.
I did not fully understand it then... I think I do now.
A contest is a room where loud does well, where a poem has thirty seconds to plant a flag before the judge reaches for the next page. Quiet poems die in that room through no fault of their own. But a quiet poem in front of the right single reader does something no loud poem can do. It moves in. It unpacks. It stays.
People talk about unexpected doors opening as if the door swings wide and light pours through and somewhere a choir warms up. That is not how mine opened.
Mine opened the width of one woman's inbox, at eleven at night, when she could have gone to bed and owed me nothing.
Since then I have tried to pay the toll forward in small denominations. When I read something good by someone unknown, I say so, out loud, in writing, to a person who can do something about it. I spend time in the corners of the internet where writers nobody has heard yet put up their work, because I know now, in a way I cannot unknow, that the distance between invisible and published can be exactly one generous stranger wide.
The poem never won anything, for the record. It was published, it was read, and a man in Ohio emailed me about his own father's pockets: a harmonica, a spark plug, a photograph of a dog the family never owned. Then the issue passed, the way issues do, and the world moved on to newer pages.
My mother keeps a copy on the shelf where my father's guitar picks would have gone, if he had ever played.
And the peppermint, that long fused peppermint, is still in a zip bag in my desk, next to a three-sentence letter, in the drawer where I keep the proof that losing is not the opposite of winning.
Sometimes losing is just winning that has not found its reader yet.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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