V E R S E and I M A G E

Saturday Share – Poetry Submission Calendar

January 17, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

Calendar Update – January 17,2026

My friend Scott Owens asks this question: What is it that poets want?

The answer: To Write! To write and write until fire fills the room and our words burn themselves into the page. Or at least to come back to what we wrote yesterday and say, well, that’s not so bad.

Some poets, not all but some, also want to be read. Some of us would like our poems to be read by someone other than our mother, our friend, our teacher. So we send our poems to editors.

I share this Submission Calendar in hopes it will make the process a little easier. It will not convince you that your poem is okay or hold your hand when rejection arrives, it probably won’t ease the process of saying goodbye as your poem speeds into the ether, but it will help you put your poems in editor’s hands.

❀ ❀ ❀ Poetry Submissions Table – PDF file ❀ ❀ ❀

Here’s how I use the CALENDAR:

It’s arranged by month – look down the column to see what journals and sources are open for submissions right now!

Each row includes the web address – be sure to check before you submit, because requirements and schedules are always changing!

The row also includes other information such as:

Is this an online publication only?

Should your submission include all poems in a single document?

What file formats do they accept?

There are more instructions on the table itself. Feel free to print it out. The table currently (17 Jan 2026) contains 353 listings, including journals on hold or defunct (to save you from wild goose chases). At the end are some random references I’ve collected, a table of winners and losers on promptness of reply, and a few journals accepting art & photography.

I would really appreciate it if you notify me of any errors or suggested changes! If you have journals you’d like me to add to the table please do send me the particulars! I will try to post an updated table once or twice a year and whenever I have made significant additions and corrections to the table.

A sad postscript: as I checked listings for this update, I encountered many lit mags, both online and print, whose doors are shuttered. Some have no residual online presence at all. I can only imagine the stress that small publishers feel in our current culture, where art and truth are under full-throated attack. If you are able to make a donation, large or small, to your favorite publisher, you are keeping literature strong. You are worthy of praise.

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May your own poems leap out and insist upon their acceptance to the friendly neighborhood editor who is reading them. And even if they don’t, well, that was at least one reader!

If you find this useful, if you can suggest more journals to include, or if you discover errors please send me a comment, correction or suggestions at:

comments@griffinpoetry.com

BILL GRIFFIN / ELKIN, NORTH CAROLINA / USA

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Oh, and here’s the origin story: In 2015 I posted the prototype of this table as I was developing a tool to keep track of when and where to submit poems for publication. As the second of a two-part muse on why oh why we place ourselves at the mercy of all powerful editors, here’s the original post with description, but make sure you’re using the link at the top of this page for the most up-to-date version:

https://griffinpoetry.com/2015/08/31/editors-mercy-part-2/

Posted in calendar | 4 Comments »

Kakalak – Malone and Fox

January 16, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

[2 poems from Kakalak 2025]

Milkweed

There will come a day in Autumn when the pods

open like eyes and weep into the wind little brown

teardrops that do not fall to the earth without first

being born by strands of silken hair, white like mine,

and I who cannot fathom the god

introduced and re-introduced to me all my life

know that I must search instead for the fine

intellect, the playful imagination, the deep-felt

biophilia of the goddess who created this

tuft-winged drifter, tiny parachutist, one

among thousands, that has climbed up onto the wind,

now sails by my window, clears the fence, crosses the road without

looking both ways, floats across the barren field, up, up, caught

and flung by the Anemoi up and onward, sailing,

sailing, until the breezes abate, then, like a maestro’s arm

sweeping back and forth with the lyrical measures, lowers

itself, bit by bit, until it settles onto the earth where rains

will ruin its magnificent floss and time will rake

over it a blanket of soil. It will sleep all winter, cozy

hibernator, await the magical marriage of warmth and rain,

awaken ++++++++++++ then reach

+++++ with root, ++++++++++ then shoot,

+++++ down, +++++++++ +++ then up,

search for Hydro, +++++ for Helios, +++++++++ stretch.

Become.

Gina Malone

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Molasses Melodies

When I hear a sweet Southern drawl,

I feel that slight twinge of shame.

My heart pines for the ease of

slow molasses on my tongue.

There’s a taste of it, way down.

Like a valley crick tumbling through

shady woods, full of oaks and hickory.

I yearn for smooth vowels in words

shaped by hills in the distance.

Rolling over and over to enjoy

the way sounds feel in my mouth.

Without knowing it, I sold my heritage,

plum ruint my Southern soul

with every g added on to:

fixin’, fishin’, fussin’ and fightin’.

Turned all my cain’ts to can’ts.

Traded my Piedmont roots,

so people didn’t have to taste

the red clay in my words.

Maeve Fox

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. . . the way sounds feel in my mouth. A poem is a song, a duet of heart and mind. A trio when soul joins the chorus. Maybe the poem conceives itself from words and story and form, but the poem lives in the wedding of music and meaning. A throaty rumble in my gut. A bright lance in my mind. The poem is the way sounds feel deep in the core of me.

Each of these two poems in its own way rumbles and trembles me. The earth goddess loves all creation enough to send feathered seedlets dancing. The root and spring of a person’s source never go dry but bubble to the surface. I find joy and celebration in these poems, and joy finds me.

And these poems are personal. Last week my granddaughter and I found dried pods at the edge of the garden – dogbane, cousin of milkweed – and peeled them apart to watch their delicate floss rise in the wind. My mother, born and raised in Winston-Salem, kept that faint sweetness in her voice for 96 years until her death last year. Whether she lived in Delaware, Michigan, Ohio, when neighbors would comment, “Cookie is from the South,” when she spoke all I ever heard was Mom. Thank you, Poetry, for connecting me to precious moments and to memories I need to live.

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Gina Malone (Waynesville, NC) asks What Does Anyone Know About Goddesses? in her new chapbook from Kelsay Books, 2025.

Maeve Fox (Hickory, NC) is a mediator who writes about LGBT and Appalachain life, and she has a new book from Redhawk, Letting Go of Me.

These poems (and author bios) are from the newest Kakalak anthology of poetry and art, published annually. Voices new and established. Songs of longing, songs of celebration. Purchase Kakalak HERE and consider submitting your own work in 2026.

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.

If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to

COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM

Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

Posted in Imagery | Tagged Gina Malone, Kakalak, Maeve Fox, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing | 9 Comments »

from Pedestal – Johnson and Fisk

January 9, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

[ 2 poems from Issue 97 of Pedestal ]

To Rest Here

in the museum of my children

smooth the comforter

curl up and be the child

adhesive streaks on the ceiling

the last of the glow-in-the-

dark planets

I rest between the old

globe and the stuffed closet

the hoard of their natural history

tiny sweaters with buttons of bone

primitive sculptures

I hold onto these I still hold

their small weight

sweet sticky hands

in my hair

when I circled them and

absorbed their light

when I was their moon

Marilyn A. Johnson

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As if it weren’t enough to bear

the world’s dark cloak, the inhumanity

of man which knows no limit,

30-foot high flash-flooded rivers, the charred

acres lit by wind and lightning or cigarette butts

cheerfully tossed out speeding car windows

at midnight, we can’t escape our own

shallow thinking: who has wretched taste

in evening wear, or too many tattoos,

who exudes the rank smell of weed through

his pores in the 9-item quick line. Jesus, it’s bad.

Worth masking up again even if you aren’t afraid

of Covid or SARS the way you should be.

Managing so many large and small disasters

while newly on a budget and nervous about keeping

your job, or Medicaid, or Social Security,

and the chemo has ruined the nerves in your feet

so you keep falling in strange places for no reason.

Fuck. And then Gaza, and Sudan, and ICE picking

off people who aren’t white enough to live

in this country or at all according to the spiteful

rich bastards in charge this week. I am so furious,

and sorry, and don’t think writing poetry

does much good unless you accidentally hit

the bulls-eye sweet spot of something obvious

but deep that has never been said, or not recently,

not in today’s language, somehow blending

hope and humor in a salve to smear over

this seeping wound we all have. A little respite.

Other than that it’s just line after line

of ordinary frustration. And now we’re all sitting

around on a Friday morning in July and I just turned

70, the coming of age of everyone who’s ever

been elderly. I mean, really, what the fuck?!

Molly Fisk

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The wound we all have: seeping, obvious, choking the room with stink; or cloaked, penetrating, a stone or a shackle. When nothing makes sense what’s left but to rage and wail? When there is no recovering sense from the senselessness, what’s left but to smooth the comforter and curl up in the past, comfortless though it may prove to be?

These two poems snagged me at one particular morning’s perigee and swung me in circles, up and around and back again. There’s already too much evil in life to add more to it with some compulsion to feel guilty when a smidge of joy seeps in. There’s too much of life – life gone by and life circling around right now and maybe just maybe more life tomorrow – to chuck joy out the window entirely. Impermanence . . . suffering . . . joy, damn it! No rationalization requested, no forgiveness sought as I reach the last line with a silly grin on my face and shout to life, “Really, what the fuck!”

❀

These two poem are among many other saviors of sanity in Issue 97 of Pedestal. After twenty-five years of continuous publication, this is the final issue. John Amen founded Pedestal and is its managing editor, assisted by poetry editors Arlene Ang, melissa christine goodrum, Stefan Lovasik, Michael Spring, Susan Terris and the hundreds and thousands of writers who have submitted poetry and book reviews over the years. Thank you, Gang. And thank you for alerting us that although Pedestal will not be publishing new editions you will be maintaining back issues online indefinitely.

Marilyn A. Johnson (marilynjohnson.net) lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley. recent poetry can be read online in UCity Review, Plume, and the Provincetown Journal. Her three non-fiction books include The Dead Beat, about obituary writers; This Book Is Overdue, about librarians and archivists in the digital age; and Lives in Ruins, about contemporary archaeologists.

Molly Fisk (mollyfisk.com) lives in California’s Sierra foothills. She edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Molly’s publications include The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary. Her new collection, Walking Wheel, arrives in April from Red Hen Press. She

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.

If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to

COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM

Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill