Submissions guidelines
We recommend reading this entire page, as it answers any questions you may have about our aesthetics, submissions, rights, and other site particulars.
SUBMISSIONS ARE CURRENTLY OPEN AND ROLLING.
We will be closed to submissions throughout September and October 2026.
What do we publish? We publish poetry—13 poets each month, on no particular schedule throughout the month. We also publish poetry book reviews, collaborative poetic works, and translated poetic 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).
What to include: 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 in the body of the email, please. Simultaneous submissions are more than welcome, but we do not accept previously published work, including work posted to your blog or social media.
When do we respond? In a perfect world, we aim to respond within 30-45 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.
Important policies: Luna Luna is a space for fresh, original work. 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. 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.
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 overripe orchards, ritual, madness, amphorae of wine, hypnotic dancing, liberation, destruction, and fever-dreams. We are the Bacchantes.
We seek a feast of language; give us the lush, the decadent, the lyrical. Maximalism. We are hungry for the delphic, the ecstatic oracular. We love the unexpected in lineation, turns, syntax, 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.
We are less interested in hyper-realism, pop culture poetry, sentimentality without edge, and overly narrative work.
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, Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, Joyelle McSweeney, Anne Carson, Danez Smith, Johannes Göransson, Etel Adnan, Eve Babitz, Ocean Vuong, 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.
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.