For our June anniversary issue, SPLERT seeks original, unpublished work from poets who grew up in Potomac, Maryland but tell people they are from “Rockville.” We are looking for a poem about a playground swing drafted in the early aughts and dusted off recently, featuring one or two details added for characterization and to convince the writer they have in fact matured since college. We are especially interested to include voices of new writers along with the voices of more established writers. We really mean that. One hundred percent. Yep.
Open Call for Submissions: Poplar Street Review seeks original work that has not previously appeared online. We seek to showcase work from people who previously rented on the 400-500 block of Poplar Street and since have relocated to N. Sturbridge Ave. near where it intersects 9th. We are seeking concrete poems that treat the topic: assembling an IKEA MALM dresser with a current/former lover. We are always interested to hear varied interpretations of this theme. People who assembled the four-drawer model in 2008 and whose first names have three letters especially encouraged to apply.
DEJECTED CASSETTE is an experimental zine looking for poetry and flash from writers whose work we previously rejected without a second thought in June 2021. We are interested in writing that explores the life transition from teaching preschool to parenting a preschooler. We want work that grabs us by the collar and screams, “I have hangups about society’s appraisal of the way I spend my time,” work that glimmers with the shallowest knowledge of the landscape of contemporary American poetry, work that dances on the border between kind-of-brave-honesty-I-guess and cringey self-disclosure, work whose indents don’t quite appear intentional, whose italics are seemingly random. We ask a modest submission fee of $3.14 to help us cover the costs of our platform and also because your husband is like, a lawyer, right?
bloodink sprung up in the Bay Area area among friends looking to create a vibrant home for genre-defying sci-fi, horror, slipstream, speculative fiction, hybrid, dark, and absurdist writing (“‘ing”). For our Summer 2024 issue, we are looking for ‘ing on the theme “Middle School.” A horror story—totally fictional of course—about the time your crush asked you to call him and sent you his number on AIM with area code 911. Speculative fiction in which a LiveJournal “Who’s Hottest?” poll comes online in a staid suburb, featuring the names of ten girls in the sixth grade. Slipstream in which the narrator enters an Abercrombie dressing room with her BFF to try on cool T-shirts printed with the names of made-up small businesses—only to discover a wormhole leading to GapKids, where the narrator’s mother holds up snowflake print “half-camisoles” the narrator might wear under her clothes on gym days. Things so far outside the norm of what could happen in real life, you say out loud, “This ‘ing is sick!” We accept submissions as Word documents and PDFs for a modest charge of $3.66. Submissions written in whiteout on a black Converse sneaker can be mailed to us with no submission fee required.
half-farthing press is looking for very short poems that can be about literally anything. We will cap at 100 submissions (one poem per writer, please) and will feature the top 98 selections in our Winter Issue. Because we are a small publication we cannot respond to each submission. Writers whose work has been selected will be notified when the Great Barrier Reef returns to its historical peak biomass.
Look! A Third Publication Link strives to be a third publication link on a writer’s WordPress page so that the writer seems legit. Reading period starts today and ends whenever you send us your work. We seek work that is discernibly wry but not quite funny, work so subtly ironic that one might mistake it for cliché. Any of the American sonnets you wrote about houseplants should be fine, just pick one. Or that poem you wrote last fall about the lunar eclipse. It’s good! We believe writers should be paid for their work and provide each writer whose work we select an expensive salad at the fast-casual joint of their choice (prose) or a rubber keychain (poetry). [Note: Due to circumstances beyond our control, we’ve had to put L!ATPL on indefinite hiatus. As we don’t know the future of L!ATPL we will be returning all pending submissions. Salad vouchers for prose writers will still be honored, please contact us via email to collect.]