Fiona Sampson is a translator, editor and health care writer. Her poetry collections are Picasso's men (1994), Folding The Real (2001) and co-translations of Jan Kaplinski. Rejection Letter Not getting picked’s a silence that       comes up close and muffles your teeth like sacks on horses’ hoofs. It is a little death       as anyone who’s stood on tarmac in a racing November wind, waiting to be       chosen by friends gone suddenly glittering and distant, knows.       The groupness of them’s a force pushing across the playground with the       wind off the Irish sea like the words you can’t push       against your teeth. You’ll grit them again now: the grown-up stripped       in her aertex and sandals while the minutes go back and forward       like the long-legged Big Girls and their incomprehensible favours. Drawing the Line The living line keeping the grass - grass - or the sky full: where it rises from the paper as if it was there already like a ghost or a miracle waiting to be moved (and we’re moved): its unallowed width invisible but black - a pigment sprinkle at the edge crowding to what we think of (if we do) as a whole - a hole? - running over, running across the picture like a cut, a deep otherness making up the picture as if to point out some kind of fear or resolution holding it in: light or the raised arm, the ball breaking it open, breaking it onto the page: the weight of the shadow, the falling line, the way the muscles and tendons must bunch to it, the loss of whatever it was the moment just before it was - this - nowness and thisness: this line.