Submissions guidelines
Submissions are currently CLOSED.
We will reopen submissions November 1 — November 31, and then we close again until March 1, 2027.
WHAT DO WE PUBLISH? We only publish original new poetry, collaborative poetic works, and translated poetry. We aim to publish 13 poets each month, though our schedule isn’t perfectly fixed.
WHAT TO INCLUDE: Send up to 5 poems in a single document, or 1 poetry review to lunalunamag@gmail.com.
No more than 20 pages total.
Submit a third-person bio in the body of the email, please.
Simultaneous submissions are more than welcome, but we do not accept previously published work. We understand poets post their work to social media, and we don’t have hard or fast rule against it. That said, we’d prefer to share fresh, new work.
No need for a long cover letter explaining your poetry to us, unless it’s part of a project that requires context for the reader.
Withdrawals: Please respond directly to your original submission email with withdrawals rather than sending a new email.
TRANSLATION: You may submit translations with the English + original language together—provided you are the author writing in both languages or/and you are the translator and have explicit approval from the author or estate to submit the translation and original works. If the author is living, please include them on the email submission.
RESPONSE TIME & OTHER FAQ: In a perfect world, we aim to respond within 30-45 days.
We do not have the capacity to provide feedback about declined work.
If you have been previously published by us, please wait 9 months before submitting again.
If declined, please wait 3 months before resubmitting.
If your work is accepted, you will receive an email when your poetry goes live during or around the month it is intended to go live. There is no need to check in. There is no fixed schedule.
AI + ATTRIBUTION POLICY: Luna Luna honors the beauty and magic of HUMAN work. By submitting your work, you affirm that it is entirely your own, contains no AI-generated or AI-assisted content, is not plagiarized, and does not knowingly infringe on any intellectual property rights. We reserve the right to remove any work found to be plagiarized or created with AI. If another writer inspires your work, please provide the proper credit. For Centos or Golden Shovels, full attribution is required.
RIGHTS: We ask for First Serial Rights. This is standard, and it means we are asking to be the first place to publish your poetry. After the piece is published, you’re free to publish it elsewhere (ex., a book collection). You always keep copyright. We kindly ask for acknowledgement as the first publisher if you do republish.
aesthetics & adorations
If a God sat on our masthead, it would be Dionysus/Bacchus. We are intrigued by the headiness of the ecstatic. We seek poems of maximalism, overripe orchards, ritual, madness, big grief, huge feelings, amphorae of wine, hypnotic dancing, liberation, lust, obsession, destruction, drama, lust, wildness, yearning, endless darkness, obsession, and fever-dreams. We seek a feast of language; give us the lush, the lyrical, the oracular. We are hungry for the delphic. We are the Bacchantes.
We love the unexpected in lineation, syntax, and form. 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 that use surprising language.
We are less interested in hyper-realism, modern pop culture references, sentimentality without edge, overtly witchy or mythological work, and highly narrative work. Again, we prefer the abstract and timeless.
Here are some prompts: 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 poetic patron saint is Marosa di Giorgio. We also adore Richard Siken, Anaïs Nin, Marguerite Duras, Andre Aciman, Carl Phillips, César Vallejo, Bhanu Kapil, Mahmoud Darwish, Jean Genet, Clarice Lispector, James Baldwin, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joyelle McSweeney, Paul Celan, Anne Carson, Danez Smith, Johannes Göransson, Violette Leduc, Etel Adnan, Eve Babitz, Ocean Vuong, María Negroni, Aase Berg, Charles Baudelaire, Kaveh Akbar, John Keats.
notes & other information
Awards: We will begin nominating for the following awards in 2027: The Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net.
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. 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.