Dear Poet
Warm regards,
Dear Poet
Thank you for your submission. We have received your work and have added it to our reading queue, which, believe us, is of as much importance to us as the last four letters are to “queue”.
We are offering an exclusive discount code for our submitters which you can use to purchase any of our print or digital issues, or merchandise, from our virtual shop. Apply the coupon PATIENCEISAVIRTUE during checkout to avail a whopping 6.9% off any purchase, applicable once per user.
Since we are a small team of over two dozen well-paid readers reading and responding to hundreds of paid submissions per annual cycle, we request you to wait at least six months before querying.
Occasionally we may take over a year, or even two, to slap you with a rejection letter after your reluctant post-six-month query about your submission. Few lucky submitters have celebrated consecutive leap years with us. (A grand old man of letters sent us a suite of timely poems the day the Halley’s Comet appeared in 1910. His daughters were honored to have their late father’s poetic sequence published, along with his obituary, in our 1986 issue, coinciding with the reappearance of the punctual—like our acceptance letter—comet.)
We understand that our reading times can be a bit taxing on your nerves. Here’s what you can do in the meantime: find a love interest, woo them, propose, tie the knot, travel the world (although we doubt your wallet, since you say you are a poet), have a baby (biological or adopted, per your preference), wait for it to develop cognition, then read to your child our form rejection letter to make the kid feel proud of their parent whose work we really enjoyed reading but had to pass on it because it wasn’t what we were looking for at that moment—the moment being two-year-long if you happen to be that lucky.
Warm regards,
Editors, The Flash Review
P.S. We suggest reheating our regards every time you open this email to calm your fidgety ass.
Ankit Raj Ojha is a poet and academic from Chhapra, Bihar, India. He has a PhD in literature from IIT Roorkee and is working as an assistant professor of English at Government College Gharaunda, Karnal. He is the author of Pinpricks (2022), editor at The Hooghly Review, and winner of the Briefly Think Essay Prize 2023. Ankit's publication credits include Poetry Wales, Poetry Scotland, Stanchion, Dreich, Briefly Zine, Roi Fainéant Press, Porcupine Literary, Routledge, Johns Hopkins University Press etc. X: @ankit_raj01 || Instagram: @ankitrajojha1 || Linktree: linktr.ee/rajankit
