The Poem I Almost Left Out

By Dawn Visionary

The envelope was plain manila, the kind that never looks like it holds anything worth holding your breath over. My landlord had propped it against the door of my Capitol Hill apartment and I stood in the hallway with my coat still on for a full minute before I opened it. I knew the return address. I knew what I hoped it said. The publisher said yes. The collaborative anthology I proposed last winter, twenty-two poets and a title we are still arguing about, is going to be a real book with a real spine and a barcode on the back. I called my mother. I called Alex. I danced around my kitchen while Luna watched from the top of the fridge like I had finally lost my mind, which, in fairness, I had. ## Then the Submissions Came In Nobody tells you that the weeks after the yes are mostly logistics. Three hundred and eleven poems landed in my inbox in nine days, which sounds romantic until you are

reading them at eleven at night with a mug of tea gone cold beside you. Of course I built a spreadsheet. I am an Earth type with a Fire streak, and I need somewhere to put what I feel. I sorted them into folders. Strong, possible, not this time. I told myself I was being analytical. I tell myself that a lot, usually right when I am avoiding something. ## I Kept Picking the Gently Lit Ones About two weeks in, I noticed the pattern. Every poem I moved into the strong folder ended in some kind of light. A grandmother's kitchen with the radio on. A marriage slowly repairing itself. Rain stopping. Beautiful work, all of it, and I stand by every single choice. But there was a stack I kept setting aside, and when I finally looked at what those poems had in common, the answer was simple. They were uncomfortable. They did not resolve. They did not thank anybody on the way out. Here is the honest

part. My whole life is built around wonder. I am the person who texts her friends about pink sunrises and hidden gardens and the way Pike Place hums on a Saturday morning. That is not a costume I put on. It is genuinely how I move through the world, and it is why astrology took hold of me so hard in the first place, because a sky that keeps offering you something new is a sky worth sitting up for. The shadow side of that, the part I am still learning at twenty-five, is that wonder can turn into a filter. You get so skilled at finding the beautiful thing that you begin editing out everything which does not glitter. ## The Poem I Almost Left Out There was one. A poet I have never met wrote about her father's last year in a voice so plain and so angry that I read it twice and then sat on my floor with my back against the radiator for a while. There is no comfort in it. No lesson. Nobody

grows. It just ends, the way those years end. My first note in the margin, and I am not proud of this one, was: does not fit the tone. Which really meant: does not fit the book I want to be standing next to. I left it in the possible folder for four days. Four days is a long time for a poem to sit there while a woman decides whether her book can survive it. What tipped the scale was something small. I was doing a reading that week for a client going through a separation, and I heard myself explaining away a difficult placement in her chart, softening it, handing her the version that glittered. She stopped me. She said, I did not come here to be told it is fine. I came here to be told the truth about the sky I actually have. I went home and moved that poem into the strong folder. It is in the book. It sits at the end of the third section, and it makes everything before it braver. ##

Editing as an Act of Attention People assume editing is subtraction. For me it turned into attention, which is a different discipline altogether. Choosing what goes into an anthology becomes a spiritual practice if you let it. It stops being about the twenty-two best poems. It becomes about the twenty-two poems that tell the truth together. Every chart has a Saturn, and every anthology needs the poem that will not console you. That is what balance actually means. I do chakra work twice a week, and I can tell you that nobody arrives at a balanced center by skipping the one that hurts. You keep the whole column, not only the bright ones, and you keep it on purpose. ## Closing Reflection The book arrives in the spring. Around page seventy-nine, if the typesetter holds. I wrote the poet a note when I sent her the acceptance. I told her the truth, which is that her poem is the reason this

anthology has a spine in more than one sense. I still believe in wonder. I am never going to stop texting anyone who will listen about sunrises. But I know the difference now between a wonder that turns away and a wonder that sits down on the floor with you and looks at the hard thing until it can see it clearly. The second kind is the one worth building a life on. Turns out it is also the one worth building a book on. If you are carrying a poem that refuses to resolve, send it to me. I promise not to leave it in the folder.