Submissions guidelines
We recommend reading this entire page, as it will answer any questions you may have about the entire process, including submission, acceptance, decline, style, rights, and other site particulars.
Submissions for poetry & poetry book reviews are CLOSED from December 31 to March 1, 2026. Submissions sent in January and February 2026 will be deleted unread (sorry).
When we are open to submissions, we publish poetry—13 poets each month, on no particular schedule throughout the month. We also publish poetry book reviews, collaborative works, and translated works (where English + [insert language] are included together—provided you are the author writing in both languages or/and you have worked with the translator).
Send up to 5 poems in one document, or 1 poetry review to lunalunamag @ gmail dot com. No more than 20 pages total. Submit a third-person bio. Simultaneous submissions are more than welcome.
In a perfect world, we aim to respond within 30 days, though it may take longer. If declined, please wait three months before submitting again. We do not have the capacity to provide feedback about declined work. If your work is accepted, you will receive an email when your poetry goes live during the month it is intended to go live. There is no need to check in. There is no fixed schedule.
By submitting your work, you affirm that it is entirely your own, contains no AI-generated content, is not plagiarized, and does not knowingly infringe on any intellectual property rights. You also confirm that it has not been previously published in print or online. If your work is inspired by another writer, please provide the proper credit. For Centos, full attribution is required. We reserve the right to remove any work found to be plagiarized or created with AI.
aesthetics & adorations
We seek a feast of language; give us the lush, the decadent, the lyrical. Fever dreams. Prosody. We are hungry for the unexpected and the delphic, the ecstatic oracular. Crafted lineation, surprising turns, play with syntax. We are drawn to the experimental and the abstract. We crave hybridity: prose poetry (especially prose poetry!), epistolary poems, epitaph-poems, work that edges into essay or vignette. We also love tiny, resplendent, sharp poems.
We are less interested in hyper-realism, pop culture poetry, sentimentality without edge, and overly narrative work.
We love the dark and the bright, the holy and unholy. Dream logic. Lynchian strangeness. Secrets. Girlhood, especially dark girlhood. The monstrously confessional. Belonging, home, abandonment. Explorations of foster care and adoption. The transgressive, the obsessive, the yearning. Place, country, old rooms. Liminal spaces and thresholds. The profane. Poems of the Mediterranean. The erotic. Catholica through new lenses. Nostalgia. Putrid lemons, afternoon light, ruminations. Fathomless desire. Ancients and saints. Folklore. The dark edges of faith. Disability, chronic illness, the body as animal, as vessel, as beloved. The uncanny. Obituaries. Shadow selves. Abandoned selves. Monster selves. Soft selves. Zodiac poetry.
Our patron saint is Marosa di Giorgio.
Voices we adore: Richard Siken, Anaïs Nin, Marguerite Duras, Andre Aciman, Carl Phillips, César Vallejo, Bhanu Kapil, Mahmoud Darwish, Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, Joyelle McSweeney, Anne Carson, Danez Smith, Johannes Göransson, Etel Adnan, Eve Babitz, María Negroni, Aase Berg, Charles Baudelaire, James Baldwin, Kaveh Akbar, John Keats.
notes & other information
Awards: We nominate for the following awards: The Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net.
AI policy: We support human expression and the beautiful occult nature of creativity. Therefore, we maintain a zero-tolerance policy regarding AI-generated poetry and other works.
Our values: We lovingly welcome LGBTQIA, BIPOC, low-income, immigrant, disabled, and neurodivergent writers. We encourage current and former foster youth to submit their work. We have a zero-tolerance policy for work that glorifies or promotes racism, sexism, xenophobia, animal cruelty, sizeism, ableism, classism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, & white supremacy.
If your work is published: If published, quotes from your work may appear on our Instagram, Facebook, or other social channels for promotion. Our site width is fairly narrow, so poems with wide-set borders or experimental form may need to be published as images to preserve form. Writers, you keep copyright, but Luna Luna requests that if a piece is republished, please make sure the second publication provides credit and a backlink, indicating that Luna Luna Magazine was the first to publish. We regret that we cannot pay contributors at this time.
Image credits: The images you see on our site may come from Lisa Marie Basile, Unsplash, or Pinterest. Captions will credit the source. Our Pinterest page houses every single Pinterest image we use here and on social media.
A note: Luna Luna is run by one human with a job and a family and a body. Your patience and kindness are appreciated.