Sometimes I think about someone I’ll call Sammy, who sent in on average one poem every day to the magazine where I worked as the literary assistant. This was a long time ago, darlings. Long, long time ago. Before the war. Well, after one war, but before the next one. Before cell phones. One of my jobs at the magazine was to go through the poetry submissions, to reject the bad ones, and to send the good ones on to the poetry editor. The poetry editor looked over the names I sent her, and made sure I wasn't rejecting people she knew.

I was good at rejecting poems, in the sense that I could easily tell which poems were decent, and which were not. I was bad at rejecting poems, in the sense that I used the worst faded, smudged, off-center, copy of a copy of a copy of a form rejection letter and never wrote anything personal on it. I was a soul-crusher. On top of that, Sammy sent in a poem or two every day, and when I started, I thought I had to respond to each of these poems. I sent him how many of those form letters in the first few months I was there? Soul-crushing, multiplied.

Finally, I got a letter from Sammy that wasn’t a poem, or not just a poem. I’m sure there was a poem in there, but there was also a letter, asking me to stop sending rejection letters. He just wanted to send his poems out, he said. I respected his wish, in the sense that I stopped sending him the horrible form rejection letters. I didn’t respect his wish, in the sense that I never after that opened his letters, and put them directly in the trash. I can’t say I’m sorry, either, because his poems were so bad.