The Ritual

Superstitions of writers

Each year I throw six sacrificial lambs, I mean poems, at New Yorker Magazine. It is a ritual. It never amounts to anything, but I do it anyway, even though I never even get rejection letters.I have always wanted to be in the New Yorker and I remember once it changed everything for a poet. I am that old.

All writers have rituals and this is one of mine, sending poems to land up in a landfill or at the bottom of the river with Jimmy Hoffa. I still do it, though it always will not will ever see print, or the light of day. Eventually, I might have to withdraw them, but I don’t think they ever even open the file they were sent.

The Ritual

I submit whenever I remember  

once a year or whatever the guidelines are.

Because there’s something about another rejection

Throwing poems folded into animals

Paper tigers and swans alike,

at the moon and seeing them drown

in the East River.

They just vanish from living.

Poems end up with Jimmy Hoffa.

But I do it anyway.

Just in case.

A foolish ritual to avoid kadot-

the rarefied mainstream publication

air that shuns poetry

in general lately, especially 

from those at the kiddie table,

written in crayon and blood

from forking around and finding out.

This is my strange immortality.

A poem hovers on pages

my epitaph.

it needs more magic-

Like cowbell,

they need more speculative poetry.

A paper Hindenberg 

a crepe paper moon lander

thrown at Pluto, both of them-

the distant dwarf planet and the dark Underworld.

(Hell, even that cartoon dog-thing,

There are actually three Plutos.

So a poem for each.

Just covering all the bases!)

The dog-thing retrieves it with

rejection grasped in its jaws.