“To ‘trash’ this piece broke my heart a bit. It was rejected by every lit mag it has been submit to since first writing it in 2020. I’m quite happy with this poem not because I think it’s my best work but because it captures a vulnerable time in my life. I wrote this poem for myself and only myself, not trying to meet guidelines or make it easy to understand; my goal was expression. And I will keep working to find a home for this little weird poem.”

“This poem relates some of the experience I had, distracting my 5 year old daughter, shortly before the loss of my stepfather. I was writing to the future me - trying to help her understand the depth of loss she was feeling and yet also see how deeply it fits into the cycles of the world - that the daughter on her lap would one day be within that cycle as well. I wanted future me to understand how precious that moment was. I wrote that poem about fifteen years ago, revised it significantly, and still have never sent it out - as it never, really, feels as though it invites a reader into the experience. It is a simple and private moment, one perhaps more fit for a personal journal than a publication.”

“This poem relates an experience I had in the early 2000s, when I came out from work to find a dead Canada goose on the ground by my car. People drove around it and seemed unphased by its presence and I was paralyzed by the image - the seeming uselessness of the moment, so I tried to work through it in a poem. The poem never felt finished, as I think I wanted the poem itself to provide me with explanation or a feeling of closure and, unfortunately, it never did.”

“I normally write fiction, not poetry. This came to me largely fully formed, and in a voice I wouldn't normally write in. It doesn't fit well within the broader canon of my work, and I didn't try hard enough to find a home for it before giving up and relegating it to the dustbin of scrapped pieces. My short fiction has appeared in Luna Station Quarterly and JAKE and is upcoming in Cloves Literary (Nov 2022) and The Bitchin' Kitsch (Jul 2023).”

“I scrapped this poem because, for a long time, it was the single neglected poem in my submissions roster. I wrote it in a flurry of heartfelt enthusiasm and put an enormous amount of effort into the environmental metaphors, hoping to evoke the rural Manitoba of my childhood. But, since I don't normally write poems, I didn't know what to do with it, and then, before I knew it, it was old and didn't meet my standards anymore.”

 “I gave this poem up after a couple of rejections because all I heard was that it was too personal. There wasn't enough context that would make my family's story make sense. That while the words were good, it was hard to connect with. I felt like giving more context would ruin what I was trying to write about, so I just let it sit untouched.”

“It’s a translation and I thought it was too simple so I left it in a corner.”

“I wanted to like this poem a lot; I even read it at public reads more than once. I ultimately trashed this poem because it was an experiment in form that I felt just didn’t work out.”

“All of these poems come from a manuscript I am compiling in a similar spirit to trash to treasure’s mission – I am revising and reclaiming years of my idle, impulsive free writes and polishing them into something that means more.”

“I submitted this two or three times, until I received feedback for it. On the one hand, I could relate to the suggestions that were made. On the other hand, I just couldn’t find the right starting point for revision.”

“Regarding ‘Let’s go out to a movie show’, I thought for a while about writing erotic poetry, and tried, but after widening my reading in erotic poetry, especially in the adult section of All Poetry, I realized that women write better erotic poetry and stories than I could and ever would. So, I just abandoned the piece. Re-reading, I think that was the right decision, as the poem is so teen boy POV that it never gets exciting.
‘Biographies’ has too much self-pity in it. I think that good poetry rises above self-pity. Again, it’s a youth’s poetry, not mature. Is there anything of worth in it? Maybe, if you were an activist once.”

“Rather than trashed, these are some of the poems that were kept in a metaphorical chest with rusty locks, guarded with snakes. I am 21 now and these were written in the dark ages of my 15th year, like for example, the first one is literally a live word vomit during a panic episode. I am (glad to say) far better emotionally than before, and reading these poems brings a lot of ache and not-so-good memories that I would really like to forget, but I can’t, so they were just left to rot…”

“It is made of lines from a story I trashed due to feeling that it didn't have enough of a plot to be worth finishing. However, I wanted to take some of the lines from the piece and give them new life; hence, this poem.”

“I thrashed these set of poems due to internal reasons. When I first wrote these poems - most especially Hymn of Grief and the third poem - I felt I was resurrecting a grief memory. As climate change were fostering, most houses were flooded which form the basic part of the third poem. I remember how an infant was rescued, already death. It was saddening, so I cast them away. Until recently, I decided to revisit them and let the world know about these events.”

“These two poems were rejected by another publication, and I was going to sit on them for a bit. I am a believer in that time can be a great editor, so my plan was to return to these pieces at some point in the future. However, I can be a bit forgetful and have actually unintentionally abandoned poems just because I never thought to go back and edit them.”

“I trashed this piece because it feels more like a personal letter to someone who never had the chance to hear it.”

“I trashed this because it felt more like a reminder for myself to forgive my family for any mistakes they made while they were raising me, because if I was in their position I don’t know if my choices would be any different.”

“I wrote this piece while hiding away at a party during my sophomore year of college. I trashed it because I was simply struggling to find my place in the world. I didn’t know who I was. Looking back, this piece is one of my favorites.”

"I scrapped this one because I found the language to be quite basic and a similar idea done by someone else.”

“This piece was written in college and the story it was based on has long since been abandoned.”