Submissions guidelines

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

Submissions for POETRY are currently open and rolling. We are open until DECEMBER 31, 2025, at which point we will not reopen until MARCH 1, 2026. Submissions sent in January and February 2026 will not be read.

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. There is no need to check in. 

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 proper citation. For Centos, full attribution is required. We reserve the right to remove any work found to be plagiarized or created with AI.

what we adore

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, razor-sharp poems.

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

Aesthetic miscellany

We love the dark and the bright, the holy and unholy. Dream logic. Lynchian strangeness. Secrets. Girlhood. Dark girlhood. The monstrously confessional. Serration. Belonging. The transgressive, the obsessive, the yearning. Place, country, old rooms. Liminal spaces and thresholds. The profane. Poems of the Mediterranean. The places you’ve left, the selves you’ve abandoned. The erotic. Catholica through new lenses. Nostalgia. Putrid lemons, afternoon light, ruminations. Fathomless desire. Ancients and saints. Folklore. The dark edges of faith. The body as animal, as sick thing, as beloved. The uncanny. Obituaries. Shadow selves, monster selves. 

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.