Monthly Featured Poetry
Many thanks to all the poets who continue to submit to Superlative.
Here are the fantastic poems we have selected as feature publications in 2026.
If you would like us to consider your poetry for a future feature, please submit here.
Enjoy!
pervasive
​​​
you echo
long after
the room empties
you settle into bone
and hum
when it rains
you show up
in the bitterness of coffee
taken black
in sunlight
threading through
the trees
almost
remembering
where to land
in that shade of blue
i keep mistaking
for you
​
​​By Jenny Pallotti​
Jenny Pallotti is a nurse and emerging writer based in California. She writes about the often-accepted absurdity of being alive inside modern ordinary life. Her work explores longing, embodiment, survival, and the ways people leave fingerprints on each other’s nervous systems.​
Somewhere warmer
​
​Glinting metal, across your shoulder.
A click that tickles the ear.
People still forget their seat belts.
A hill directly above us, the Oita coastline on the horizon,
and yet the first time we kissed was in the parking lot.
Your hands are never warm. Inside
your pockets, between my hands, buried
beneath blankets, they stay cold.
In the winter, you said we were too cold
to warm each other. I made
soup every evening until you were convinced
to stay a day extra. Days passed.
Then weeks. Then months. You left
things over at my place
dirty laundry, cinnamon sticks, empty
​bags for your belongings that never emptied.
We keep all our promises
​in transition; board games we don't finish,
poems we read halfway, places
we don't visit until we can't. Your bags
still have dresses I put in months ago
but it is winter and we are too cold
to warm each other. You
have maybe found somewhere warmer.
I still fiddle with the seat belt.
​
​
By Avash Byanjankar​
Avash Byanjankar is a Newari poet from Patan, Nepal currently based in Beppu, Japan. He is in the process of completing a PhD in Asia Pacific Studies, and when he has time away from academia, he likes tending to his two houseplants, arguing with locals about what makes a mountain different from a hill, and ranking croissants from every bakery in town.
​
He also has poetry published by the Tiger Moth Review.
Portrait of the Artist as a Prism
​​​
Everywhere she looks she breaks
her heart
pulling apart
everything for art
Peeling apart a moment
Thumbnails into orange flesh
a mist of citrus oil in the air
pith pulled away
pips separated from membrane
segments opened into the juicy pockets within
Rainbows flung across unsuspecting surfaces
as light is loosened into its constituent parts
Art is investigation
Observing with love
where what is known meets with what is not
The purest point where curiosity and imagination
clasp each other by the hand
before
the moment when they run
jumping together into the flat face of the prism
Inside
Where everything
IS
Understanding is a sort of violence
each wonder dissected and rearranged
not out of malice of course
a toddler smashing toys to see what’s inside
Delightedly
but violence nonetheless
All these wonders running headlong into the heart
of the prism
where they will break
but not just break
What is a prism
If not a chrysalis?
secretly
melting and rearranging
some new and
glorious creation?
By Ashley Williamson
Ashley Williamson is an Arkansan poet living in the inspiring English Lake District. She attended the University of Oxford, where she earned a First-Class Diploma in Creative Writing in 2023. Her poetry won the Letter Review Poetry Prize and will be published in April 2026. Her pamphlet, Particles & Waves, was longlisted for the 2023 MsLexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition and has appeared or is forthcoming in Mantis, BarBar, The Festival Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press, among others. She also works as a radiographic interpreter for her family’s aerospace testing business.
​
Instagram: @penelaine
Website: www.ashleywilliamson.co.uk
Today is Trash Day
​​​
By then I’d given up
on small salvations.
No more sorting
the good hours from the bad,
no more rinsing old words
until they ran clear.
I stood in the kitchen light,
hands on the rim of the trash,
watching a life I’d lived
in bits and pieces—
ticket stubs, cracked bangles,
the shattered cellphone,
from the week we didn’t talk.
the receipt from that night
we pretended to forgive each other—
Let all of it slide down
in one slow avalanche.
Not this for compost,
that for recycle,
this one to keep
because it almost felt like love.
No.
I tipped the whole thing over,
bones, breath, and paper,
into the dark.
From somewhere inside the bin
a fork clinked against glass,
a child’s laugh flared and went out,
my mother’s voice rose,
swelled,
fell back into plastic.
I waited for regret
to lunge at my throat,
for memory to scramble up
the slick insides
and demand to be saved.
Nothing came.
Only the quiet hum
of the refrigerator,
the thin blue line of evening
climbing the window,
and my hands, finally empty,
hanging by my sides—
two stray creatures
no longer reaching
for what was already gone.
​​​
​​​
By Shailaja Vats Das
Shailaja is an emerging poet and an engineer living in Los Altos, California.
She was born and raised in a small town, Ranchi, in India, and now shares a slightly chaotic home with her husband, two teenage children, a dog, and more useless objects than she would ever agree to labeling thus. When she is not navigating her professional life or tending to her family, she is an occasional writer. Her work has appeared in an anthology Turning the Corner by Eber & Wein publishers, and is forthcoming in Superlative, A Literary Journal, in Beyond Words Magazine, and in an anthology by Wingless Dreamers Publishers. She is the editor of a coffee-table book, Boys II Men.
Website: The Voice Not Spoken
IG: @shailajavats
FB: @Shailaja.vats
Sunday evening in The Fleece
​​​
Brushed amber flushes curving burnished brass,
glosses glasses and smooth chestnut; shallow
flames flicker in a peeling grate. We’re sparse
rustling doves nestled in corners below
cream & lilac swirls; warm muted banter
flutters our feathered crowns and a tawny
haired waitress leans idly on the counter,
taps texts, slides bored eyes over ebony
tables and hands clasped in publican prayer
round beading golden pints. We bow our heads
to the incomplete chequered grid, compare
small thoughts on its clued secrets, drain its dregs.
Night presses its face against the window,
cries condensation down the glass of our lives.
By Rachael Hill
Rachael is a Manchester Poet, founder of ‘The Space Poetic’, and an MFA student at The Manchester Writing School. Her work has recently been published by Ink Sweat and Tears, and Ver Poets, and she was awarded by Wirral Poetry Festival in 2024. She is a lover of cats and climbing.
SubStack: Poet Notes
IG: @rhillpoetnotes