Submission Guidelines

We want your very best work! Writers at every stage of their career are encouraged to submit, but we want writing that goes hard. We want the stuff that punches us right in the ear, perforating the drum in such a way it prevents us from swimming that whole haunted summer, despite the heat, despite the ghost of missing out.

We want work of any genre that reminds us of the way it felt when we first fell in love with literature, that sensation we got when we first realized that this feeling we had for Zak wasn’t just admiration or jealousy, but that teenage cocktail of lust and hope that bodies can be bound together into something sweet, something sweat, something important and worth remembering. But his grandfather had just passed earlier that June, and we could tell it hit Zak hard the morning that we showed up on his doorstep. We were still on antibiotic eardrops and under orders to avoid blowing our nose, and he answered with an open, loose Hawaiian shirt, and the singe across the crest of our cheeks explained that desire had found its way back into our body for the first time in weeks, but after that initial flush, we noticed there was something off about him, that he wasn’t the charismatic skate kid we’d watched practice kickflips for months, as we sat on the curb with our own deck rolling back and forth beneath our feet. With the late morning sun bending through the glass outer door and onto his bare chest, we realized that he looked hollow—no, not exactly hollow, but, like, separate? A step removed from the moment? Not the person we saw, but like someone behind a windshield, operating his body.

Prose writers, send us 500-4,500 words of absolute heat, keeping in mind that the symbolic connection between “heat” and foundational summer crushes is too obvious, so you’ll need to talk your way into some other sort of figurative framework. Like, do you remember Deana Carter? We think of that song when we think of that summer. And, listen, we know country music is outside of the aesthetic of—whatever this is, but hear us out: yes, “Strawberry Wine” does dip its feet into the cliches of summer and heat imagery, but Carter does it in a way that gives it a little—ya’ know, like—a little turn, a little zing. When she considers the ephemeral nature of the summertime, what is named is September’s arrival rather than summer’s passing. This is season as a sort of haunting. As for “heat,” here too, Carter subverts expectations. One might expect it to arrive in the sun, summer, or bodies, but she offers instead the “hot July moon” as the only witness to her clandestine summer passion, and even though we had started listening to pop punk that year, the country song was buzzing from an alarm-clock radio flipped on for white noise to mask hard breathing. Slipping under the covers alone, the thought of sunlight on Zak’s chest rushing forward, we gently ground ourself against a pillow until nearly breathless, until having the dangerous idea to call him from the phone; it took months to convince our parents to install in the room, then hanging up the moment that he answered.

For poets, send us up to five pages of poetry in any style: we don’t care if it’s free verse, fixed verse, or even experimental—as long as it BLEEDS. We want to feel it, like a sunburn. Like a knee scoured on blacktop in the summer, a Nevada summer, a couple of weeks after we’d seen Zak at his front door. We had been coming to that parking lot of the “other mall,” where everyone skated after school and before work, each of us picking up or setting down fountain lemonades that the Greek pizza joint on the corner would usually let us steal, despite our obviousness, when we asked for free water cups. We want poetry that BLOOMS, the way we did at first, when we saw him squatting outside the driver’s door of a faded Civic, our feelings rising as we recognized his profile there in the afternoon light and unfolding as we wondered why he was crouching like that, and whose car it was, and pausing briefly to chuckle at the thought that it must have been because he was hiding a beer, maybe smoking up.

We want poems that shift our tenses. We want poems that burst into full color when we see Zak slip his thumb deep into the mouth—no, down the throat—of that rawboned emo guy who works at Spencer’s in the “good mall,” and Zak is looking at him, and he’s looking at the ceiling of his car, and that’s when we put together that Zak’s hands must be in his lap, and we can tell that they are moving fast, and Zak’s doing this thing where he’s trying to be attentive to the guy he’s getting off, but he’s also glancing around, making sure they don’t get caught, so at first we don’t think he sees us here, watching them. Then he turns his head and looks us right in the eye, as though he sensed us there, and for a breath’s length, his face shows panic as he realizes someone is watching him, until he registers that it’s us, and, as if we were in on it all, smiles: a disorderly, charming smirk.

 We smile back, eventually and also briefly, because we don’t know what else to do, then look down, pick up our lemonade cup off of the curb, and kick our deck forward to ride the opposite direction, away from asphalt lot. 

For some reason we still can’t pinpoint, the most vivid memory left today isn’t the smile, but the paired rasp of wheels on concrete, the rhythmic click as we slid along the sidewalk, away from longing.

No simultaneous submissions.