Out on a limb

A few years back, I had given up on sending stuff out to magazines. I had so many rejection slips, some of them merely frustrating, some actually cruel. Once, for example, I sent a journal a dozen poems--quite a lot for someone who doesn't write all that many--and they wanted MORE! Naturally, they didn't take even one of what I sent them. I think I sent them more, and they did the same again. That was frustrating but sort of flattering at the same time. Another time a little podunk rag told me my "sensibility sucked." Succinct, eh? Actually, I laughed at that one. Yet another time at a local journal, I sent in neatly folded, crisp poems and got back bad Xeroxes with holes punched in them. So I stopped trying.
After some success at an online publication, Qarrtsiluni, where my friend Marly was a guest editor, I began sending out tentatively again. Now I have a few things in the pipeline, including a short short story I wrote this summer in my workshop, which I sent out on a tip from Reb to an NPR radio show.
Now I'm thinking of going back to the mother lode, those magazines I always admired, like Poetry or Ploughshares or The New Yorker, on the off-chance something will work for them.
I won't be daunted by rejections. After all, I've seen it all before. But I just somehow think there won't be an unbroken series of them as there was before, especially if I intersperse these off-chance submissions with less ambitious ones.