Category: Poetry

Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: NonBinary Review #32

Deadline: May 1st, 2023
Payment: ¢ per word for prose, $10 for poetry, $25 for artwork
Theme: Epic Fail

NonBinary Review is open for submissions on the theme of “epic fail.” We’re not talking about everyday failures, like you didn’t pay the electric bill, so your lights are turned off. We’re talking about the cascades of calamity that end in death, destruction, disaster. Series of unfortunate choices that lead to plague, famine, and war. A train wreck that, once it’s been set in motion, you can neither stop nor look away from. There but for the grace of some spectacularly poor planning, bad decisions, and gross incompetence, go all of us. Let’s hear it all.

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Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Necronomi-RomCom

Deadline: August 31st, 2023
Payment: 1 cent per word for fiction, $5 per poem
Theme: Where cosmic horror meets campy romantic comedy!

Romance. Laughter. Tentacles…

Welcome to where cosmic meets cute

Welcome to the Necronomi-RomCom!

About this Project
On the face of it, blending the Necronomicom and a Rom-Com seems obvious.  Once the idea came into my mind in the summer of 2022, it wouldn’t leave until I decided to make it into a reality.  The goal is to see how many engaging ways people can blend humor, love, and the mythos. Love can be funny and it can be scary, why can’t it be both?  While also having big teeth, or tentacles, or even too many eyes?
We hope this is just the first project that will link disparate concepts in unusual ways.

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: Contrary Summer 2023 Issue

Deadline: June 1st, 2023
Payment: $20
Theme: We ask our fiction writers to imagine their readers navigating a story with one finger poised over a mouse button. Can your story stay that finger to the end?

“Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will invest in new perceptions. I will combine and recombine and fabricate and juggle until something that I have never experienced is experienced. The process is alchemical. The process is violent. It goes to the heart of creativity. It disrupts and shatters. It is splendid with provocation. It is an aggression against banality. It is sharp and loud like a janitor scraping frost from a window. The hectic bounce of steam on a street after a truck roars by. The anarchy of waters, the comedy of the face, dangerous feelings vented from a cage of skin.” ~ John Olson

Poetry — We believe poetry is contrary by nature, always defying, always tonguing the tang of novelty. We look especially for plurality of meaning, for dual reverberation of beauty and concern. Contrary’s poetry in particular often mimics the effects of fiction or commentary. We find ourselves enamored of prose poems because they are naturally contrary toward form – they tug on the forces of exposition or narrative – but prose poems remain the minority of all the poetic forms we publish. Please consider that Contrary receives vast amounts of poetry and that we can publish only a small percentage of that work. Please submit no more than three poems per issue. Our poetry editor is Shaindel Beers.

Fiction — We ask our fiction writers to imagine their readers navigating a story with one finger poised over a mouse button. Can your story stay that finger to the end? We have published long stories on the belief that they succeed, but we feel more comfortable with the concise. We favor fiction that is contrary in any number of ways, but our fiction typically defies traditional story form. A story may bring us to closure, for example, without ever delivering an ending. It may be as poetic as any poem. Our fiction editor is Frances Badgett.

Lyrical commentary/creative non-fiction —“Commentary” is our word for the stuff that others define negatively as non-fiction, nominally as essay, or naively as truth. We favor commentary that delivers a message less through exposition than through artistry. The commentary we select is often lyrical, narrative, or poetic. Examples from our pages include “Plum Island” by Andrew Coburn, “Ascension” by Kevin Heath, and “Three True Stories” by Jennifer DeLisle. Our commentary editor is Jeff McMahon.

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Events / Flash / Magazine / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Last Girls Club Summer Issue 2023 (Early)

Submission Window: April 1st – May 1st 2023
Payment: Short Story-2,500 words or less. $0.01 USD per word/$25 USD max, Poems-less than 200 words $10, Flash Fiction-less than a 1,000 words $0.01 USD per word/$10 USD max
Theme: Reparations

Last Girls Club Summer Issue Theme is Reparations. The country I live in is founded with a deep blood debt that will continue to haunt us if we do not acknowledge it. Revisionist history cannot kill ghosts. Colonialism exists everywhere. What do reparations even look like? Please go to our website www.lastgirlsclub.com to get a feel for what we publish. Acceptances will be notified on May 15.

  • No more than two fiction or flash fiction stories per author per submission period.
  • Fiction is limited to 2,500 words or less. Authors are paid $0.01 per word upon acceptance ($25 USD max).
  • Flash fiction is limited to under 1,000 words. Authors are paid $0.01 per word upon acceptance ($10 USD max).
  • No more than three poems per poet.
  • Poems are limited to 200 words or less for each poem. Poets are paid $10 upon acceptance.
  • I prefer to use PayPal to pay authors, but will work with authors where PayPal is not available.
  • Nonfiction columns will must be pitched to editor in chief before submission. Email your idea to [email protected]

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Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry / Reprints Allowed

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Taking Submissions: Tower Magazine February Window

Deadline: February 28th, 2023
Payment: €20
Theme: horror, sci-fi, fantasy and erotica that grapple with the topic of Endings
Note: Reprints Welcome

Submissions are open from February 01-28 2023 for TOWER VOL. 1: END. We accept all genres and encourage submissions of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and erotica.
For VOL. 1: END we’re looking for work that grapples with endings, death, dissolution and finality; sudden, brutal endings; torturously slow breakdowns; how do things come to an end and who gets to decide?
Some inspirations:

  • The desperation for an ending to the tortures of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s No End Will Be Found
  • The cyclical violence in “Herbert White” by Frank Bidart
  • The clash between audience and artist’s expectations of an ending in ABC’s LOST
  • The desperate battle against a prophesied ending in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
  • The incomprehensible disappearance and abrupt end of an internet friendship in Lol Cuthbert’s “This journal has been deleted and purged”
  • How we go on after the end of the world in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk and Torrey Peters’ Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones
  • The role of geography and place in predetermining a life as in Cherie Priest’s Those Who Went Remain There Still
  • The endless scroll of Tiktok

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Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Non-fiction / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: The First Line – Summer 2023

Deadline: May 1st, 2023
Payment: $25.00 – $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 – $10.00 for poetry
Theme: Story must begin with: “All the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays.”

We love that writers around the world are inspired by our first lines, and we know that not every story will be sent to us. However, we ask that you do not submit stories starting with our first lines to other journals (or post them online on public sites) until we’ve notified you as to our decision (usually four weeks after the deadline). When the entire premise of the publication revolves around one sentence, we don’t want it to look as if we stole that sentence from another writer. If you have questions, feel free to drop us a line.

Also, we understand that writers may add our first line to a story they are currently working on or have already completed, and that’s cool. But please do not add our first line to a previously published story and submit it to us. We do not accept previously published stories, even if they have been repurposed for our first lines. And, just to be clear, we do not accept simultaneous submissions.

One more thing while I’ve got you here: Writers compete against one another for magazine space, so, technically, every literary magazine is running a contest. There are, however, literary magazines that run traditional contests, where they charge entry fees and rank the winners. We do not – nor will we ever – charge a submission fee, nor do we rank our stories in order of importance. Occasionally, we run contests to help come up with new first lines, or we run fun, gimmicky competitions for free stuff, but the actual journal is not a contest in the traditional sense.

Fiction: All stories must be written with the first line provided. The line cannot be altered in any way, unless otherwise noted by the editors. The story should be between 300 and 5,000 words (this is more like a guideline and not a hard-and-fast rule; going over or under the word count won’t get your story tossed from the slush pile). The sentences can be found on the home page of The First Line’s website, as well as in the prior issue. Note: We are open to all genres. We try to make TFL as eclectic as possible.

Poetry: We do accept poetry, though rarely. We have no restrictions on form or line count, but all poems must begin with the first line provided. The line cannot be altered in any way.

Non-Fiction: 500-800 word critical essays about your favorite first line from a literary work.

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Contest / Events / Flat Amount / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls 2023 Contest

Deadline: March 1st, 2023
Prizes: $50 to the and $10 to honorable mentions
Theme: Poetry with a theme of: Seasick

the theme for this year’s contest is seasick. with global greenhouse gas emissions climbing, we want poetry that examines the way human activity is affecting the ocean. we want your drowning islands, your melting glaciers, your bleached coral. we want your hurricanes, your flooding, your erosion. we want your seasick.

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contest submissions will remain open from november 1 to march 1. winners will receive a $50 prize and publication. honorable mentions will also be published and receive a $10 prize. all decisions will be announced in early april and made by our editing staff. to get a feel for what we publish, we’d encourage you to scroll through our archives.

do beware that our publishing software doesn’t handle formatting very well, so think twice before you submit a work heavily dependent on visual presentation. for an example of what the display would look like, we’d encourage you to look at the page of “ghost ship” by charlotte oliver. (thetiderises.org/read/ghost-ship)

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Artwork / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Non-fiction / Poetry / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Strange Horizons: Wuxia & Xianxia Special

Deadline: March 1st, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 10¢/word USD, Poetry: $50 per poem, Non-Fiction: $50 for a column, $40 for a reprinted essay, $150 for an original essay, $45 to an interviewer, and $45 to an interviewee, $20 to a roundtable moderator, and $20 to each other contributor
Theme: Stories that fit in wuxia and xianxia fiction

Imagine yourself as a sword fighter, a vigilante hero and upholder of justice. Imagine you are a xia in the world of jianghu—whether a solitary traveller on a mission, an outlaw on the run, or a member of a powerful sect or dying clan. Or imagine you are a Daoist cultivator, soaring across the sky atop swords and clouds, with a story that stretches across realms and even lifetimes.

Welcome to the Wuxia & Xianxia Special, fellow walkers of the jianghu.

Many of us have become fans of wuxia and xianxia fiction ever since we first encountered eminent wuxia and xianxia authors like Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Huan Zhu Lou Zhu. Others among us fell in love with these genres through films from the Shaw Brothers Studio, Pili puppet shows, drama adaptations, RPGs, manhua, and other kinds of popular media.

Over the past decade, there has also been a new and revived interest in the xianxia genre with the rise of web novels, and more recently, through the lens of danmei, as shown by the popularity of dramas like The Untamed.

For this special issue, we are interested in:

  • Traditional and new approaches to wuxia and xianxia fiction
  • Stories full of action, conflict, drama, and intrigue
  • Rich, diverse, colourful, and nuanced worldbuilding, whether featuring the jianghu, a xianxia world, the imperial court, or other kinds of setting
  • Unique approaches to classic wuxia themes like honour, free love, good versus evil, and individual choice versus fate
  • Re-imaginings of what these genres look like in the 21st century
  • Works that experiment with, subvert, and reinvent genre tropes, including in combination with other Sinophone literary traditions such as danmei, chuanyue (time travel), gong’an fiction (court case), and beyond

The editors for the Wuxia/Xianxia Special invite you to submit fiction, poetry, translations, and nonfiction.
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