Kallie Falandays
Writing poetry is just part of the process. After you write and edit, you have to think about—ya know—the publication process. Normally, you might group a series of poems and send them out to tried-and-true magazines. But not all of your poems fit neatly with what editors say they want.
That cross-genre poem scribbled on a postcard paired with a Smiths song still needs a home, and we’re going to help you find it!
Streetcake Magazine is all about experimental writing. Their most recent issues feature pieces like “my first kiss was with a computer” by Winston Plowes, poems in the shape of houses, poems hidden inside website source code, poems that look like city advisories, and pieces you might have not expected. This is the place to send your strange little creature poems that you have no idea what to do with.
Found Polaroids is exactly what it sounds like—it’s a website with a bunch of found Polaroids. You can creep on the website and find one that inspires you. Then write a 250-300 word narrative/story/piece inspired by the photo.
Found Polaroids wants to “breathe new life” into these images. In 2017, a collection of the best stories were collected and published by Aint Bad into a beautiful collection for sale here.
Remember, don’t be scared of writing stuff that’s outside of the norm. There’s a whole bunch of us (hi!) excited to read your work, and there are magazines ready to publish your nontraditional, nonconformist, Polaroid responses.
Foglifter was created for groundbreaking queer and trans writers and it loves wild subject matter that “pushes the boundaries of what writing can do.”
They publish poets like Vianney Casas, whose bio reads like a story I want to purchase:
Vianney Casas was born in San Diego but raised in Tijuana. Before moving to San Francisco in 2013, she crossed the border every day for 6 years to go to school. She has been featured in Canto, Cipatli, Bossy, Chevere, Gentromancer, and Yerba Mala. Her work is a surrealist testimony where Spanish, psychoanalysis, visual art and artists like Garcia Marquez, Dali, Frida Kahlo, and Ana Mendieta join powers to create poetry. (From Foglifter)
Go on, submit your single poems or full-length collections to Foglifter.
MEEKLING PRESS
Meekling is a beautiful and strange press based out of Chicago run by Rebecca Elliot. They’re known for publishing poems on floppy disk, hand printing poems on postcards, and sending out zines—just like the ones you used to love in the early nineties. Meekling is great for those one-off scribbles on the back of a napkin a-la-Dickinson that you just can’t find a home for, your visionary poems begging for a press that pays close attention to detail AND can get down with your wildcards.
Their Google meta title says, “the vast labyrinthine bureaucracy of meekling press” and if that doesn’t give you a hint at what they’re excited about, their submissions guidelines might.
We are as interested in publishing a single sentence as something like a novel. What is more important is to find that sentence or that novel (etc) its most wonderful, thoughtfully-created nest. (From Meekling’s About Us page.)
So go on, submit your hybrid poems, your stories built from a single line, your work that can only be put on a floppy disk. Whatever you want to do, Meekling is probably excited about it. Please note, at the time of publication of this article, Meekling Press was not currently open to submissions.
This is a real magazine that says things like:
We’re freaks, slackers, punks, rule-breakers, people with weird ideas, writers, artists, and dreamers. We welcome writers and artists of all merit, whether you’re published in The Paris Review, rejected from The Paris Review, or DGAF what The Paris Review is.
Their letter from the editor is more like a love letter than an editorial, and sometimes, it’s a love letter to Taco Bell:
Hell, maybe it ain’t that bad. There’s still Taco Bell. But even the Taco Bell menu—that rock-solid foundation of guilty pleasures and bacchanalian sustenance—could not escape this timeline. It began hemorrhaging beloved menu items.
They want Taco-Bell themed poems. Yep. You heard me right. Taco Bell poems, stories, essays, you name it. And, despite what you might think, their magazine is always full of pieces about You Know What.
Please note, at the time of publication of this article, Taco Bell Quarterly was not currently open to submissions.
Kallie Falandays runs Tell Tell Poetry. A poetry resource site helping secret poets publish their poems.
