Fuck you.
Fuck you and your fucking poetry. It’s so fucking easy to lie when you do it in verse, isn’t it? How’d you turn lust into love? Some sort of writer’s alchemy, changing each particle of dust you shed into gold? With a thesaurus? Did you replace “spare” with “love of my life”? Does the dictionary definition for “sweetheart” list “disposable” as a characteristic? Or did you take some artistic liberties?
I want to take every single one of your hand-written poems and crush it between my teeth. I want to taste the ink dripping over my enamel like it’s blood. I want your metaphors to wither and rot from the acid in my saliva. I want your symbolism, your goddamn doves and your fucking roses, to sear on the stove of my own red tongue. I want every one of your clever turns of phrase pulverized into mulch under the pounding of my jaw. Your personified moon can suffocate in the twist of my throat, can purple and swell and curdle under the chokehold of my esophagus. And your alternating rhymes should be sliced to pieces by the swinging blades of my voice box, dissected until each sliver is unrecognizable, until you’d need a forensics report to identify the ABAB rhyme scheme. When I swallow, I want every comma, every period, and every single stupid exclamation mark disemboweled by my enzymes until even the black, Times New Roman crumbs on my lips dissolve just from my breath.
I want to do it so fucking bad but I won’t.
Not because I think your poems will give me a gastrointestinal disease but because I know I’d find bits of your words, kernels of synonyms, lodged between my teeth. Because I know I’d be picking them out for days. Because I know some might stay there forever, sucking at my gums, tunnelling out a cavity in my molars like a mine. A mine of bad memories.
I think I’ll just smash your name under my fist and call it a fucking day.
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Vera Hadzic is a writer from Ontario, Canada, currently studying English literature at the University of Ottawa. In the past, her writing has appeared in Bywords.ca, Fever Dream, Crow & Cross Keys, and is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite. She can be found on Twitter @HadzicVera.
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Rejection Letters 