“Rejection Speech” by Flavian Mark Lupinetti, published in The Pronunciation Part, winner of the 2024 The Poetry box Chapbook Prize, released in February 2025, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. To choose our nominees this year was especially challenging, for we published 31 books, including 1,080 poems in total. Among all of these amazing and moving poems, this poem continues to be one of my favorites.
This poem pulls you in with a title that immediately takes an unexpected turn, a clear signal to get ready for an emotional and masterful poem that doesn’t let go…not even when you’re finished reading it. Every time I read it, I’m left speechless.
Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.
Rejection Speech
by Flavian Mark Lupinetti
that you can’t trust a teenager
is a lesson I learned the hard way
because I trusted Tommy who was
thirteen when I met him but with
the physique of a four-year-old
thanks to a heart the size of a
half deflated beachball and just as robust
when it came to pumping blood and
although some of my colleagues said
he was too sick for me to do anything
I transplanted his heart and
by the following spring he played
Little League—not well; it turns out
that hitting a curve ball can’t
be transplanted—and over the
following years he took his antirejection
drugs and made his appointments
and developed a side hustle talking
to civic groups to raise money
for the hospital until five years later
when he decided taking meds
sucked so he quit taking them
(rejection, obituary) and if Tommy
was the only teenager who did this
that would be tragic enough but Charlene
age fourteen did the same thing because
the drugs grew hair on her forehead
and her back—talking Lon Chaney
wolfman pelt here—and Derek at sixteen
moved out of his mom’s house
to live in the trunk of a friend’s car
before giving up and that shit happens
over and over and over so don’t say a
fucking word to me when I transplant
kids who are mentally challenged
because one thing I can count on is
they’re supervised so closely they never
miss a dose and the other thing I can
count on is I never have to ask myself
should I have put that heart into somebody else
from The Pronunciation Part by Flavian Mark Lupinetti (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher
