Submissions

guidelines

We recommend reading this entire page, as it will answer any questions you may have.

Submissions are currently open and rolling. We are generally open all year unless otherwise noted. Note: we will be closed to submissions throughout all of January and February 2026; any submissions received in January and February will be deleted and never read).

We publish poetry—13 poets each month, on no particular schedule throughout the month. You will receive an email when your poetry goes live. 

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.  

We aim to respond within 30 days, although that is not a rule. If declined, please wait six months before submitting again. We do not have the capacity to provide feedback about declined work.

By submitting your work to us, you attest that your work is AI-free, that it is not plagiarized, that no intellectual property has been knowingly infringed upon, and that it is not previously published in print or online elsewhere. If you are inspired by another writer, please site the source. If you send a Cento, provide every attribution. We reserve the right to unpublish work that is found to have been stolen or written by AI. 

what we adore

We seek a feast of language; give us the lush, decadent, lyrical. Fever dreams. We are hungry for the unexpected and the delphic. The ecstatic oracular. Crafted lineation, surprising turns, play with syntax. We are drawn toward the experimental and abstract. We crave hybridity: prose poetry (especially prose poetry!), epistolary poetry, poetry that edges essay and vignette. We also like tiny, resplendent, sharp poems. 

We are less interested in hyper-realism, sentimentality without edge, and excessive narrative.

Aesthetic miscellany

Themes we love: Dark and bright, holy and unholy. Monstrously confessional. Serrated. Belonging. The transgressive, the obsessive, yearning, place, country, old rooms, worship, poems about the Mediterranean, spaces you’ve left behind, selves you’ve abandoned, the erotic, the transition between eras and seasons, nostalgia, putrid lemons, afternoon light, ruminations, fathomless desire, the ancients and saints, folklore and the spiritual, the dark edges of faith, girlhood, & chronic illness. 

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

We nominate for the following awards: The Pushcart Prize  & Best of the Net.

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.

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 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. 

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 Pinterest image we use. 

Luna Luna is run by one human with a job and a family and a body. Our editor reads and responds to every submission, formats every poem, curates and edits every image, manages the website (as well as the Chill Subs, Poets & Writers, and Duotrope pages), & creates graphics for every social media post. Your patience and kindness are appreciated.

We regret that we cannot pay contributors at this time.