Monthly Featured Poetry 2026
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!
Princess Diana Gives Her First Live Interview in 30 Years
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The news of her return, when first confirmed,
was met with joy unseen for decades. London,
Paris and New York exploded into gridlock
as a public starving for a scrap of welcome news
burst jubilant into the streets spontaneously,
leaving cars and shops and homes unlocked to
join the celebrating crowds. The sound of music,
laughter, clinking glasses, gasps of, Did you hear?
She’s back! drowned out all doubt, all thoughts of
what significance was to be found within her
rising from the dead. The footage from above
resembled bright confetti or a mass of insects,
myriad in color, swarming at the lifting of a rock.
The heaviness of grief we felt for her, at its relief,
in many ways relieved our grief for everything
we’d lost. She was as pretty as she’d ever been,
as captivating to the eye, her stockings torn
and stained with mud, her makeup smudged.
We huddled underneath enormous screens to
hear her speak. It felt as if she were addressing
each of us directly, weeping while confessing her
regrets at having left us all behind, confirming
as she did so the existence of a world beyond.
That there was something distant in her eyes,
her speech not quite as lively as remembered,
was a troublesome detail we chose immediately,
effortlessly, to ignore. With time, however, we
grew tired of her mysteries. We bristled at her
incredulity at the declining state of everything:
our dying planet, rampant poverty, the new
technology now frittering away the edges of our
empathy. Some nerve she has, we said, to question our
humanity, when she’s the one who came back perfect after
being smashed up in that car of hers, a limousine, at that!
What business does a princess have discussing our inequities?
When finally they came for her, it was on live tv,
a failing telethon, her pleading with such passion
for donations that she didn’t notice when the mob
emerged from underneath the curtain, smartphones
held aloft like torches as they gripped her wrists.
Unnatural, somebody said. A glittering corpse.
They burned her at the stake, of course, rapacious
millions tuning in to watch it happen, as before.
​
​​​​​
By SP Mulroy​
SP Mulroy is an internationally recognized writer, multi-disciplinary artist, and award-winning professor. Mulroy has given lectures on history, poetry, politics, and queer rights, as well as readings of his creative work, in bars, museums, schools, embassies, theater festivals, and underground clubs on 4 continents, in over 30 countries. A 2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project, winner of the 2019 Margaret Reid Prize, and winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mulroy's work has appeared in Boston Review, The New York Times, Assaracus, and Muzzle Magazine, among several others. Mulroy’s debut poetry collection, Hated for the Gods, was published by Button Poetry in 2023.
kuchisabishii
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I wonder what I learnt in all those years
of walking around at night, the back of neon
washed antiquity. I am about to move on.
Still, it strikes me in the absence of memory
that in all this time
there should be a moment
I can say ‘before’
and ‘after’. This was me
before I lived here, and this is me ‘after’.
Living behind the old Roman forum you see
history less day by day. Simply taking
out the rubbish before a short stroll
past the church whose name reads ‘Consolation’
in the shadow of the Palatine down towards
Circo Massimo.
Tickets to the Capitoline Museums discarded
as the pavement steps. I was thirty nine
and now I’m fifty one.
This was me before I lived here.
And this is me after.
Only don’t be so sure.
For some it is their only adult love affair.
Centuries claim out of spite. Afterwards
he walked here often, pretending
to understand history. Time posturing
as a set of ruins. He wasn’t fooled.
History is a waste truck hosing
down cobblestones.
We are all in the hands of Rome’s sanitation
department. The nightly clean-up of broken glass.
Tonight, through a blonde brunette dusk while palm
leaves raked through the sands behind his eyes
he learnt that the word kuchisabishii in Japanese
means when you’re not hungry, but eat
because your mouth is lonely.
And thought how there are all kinds of different translation
that never work.
​
​​By Jonathan Jones​
Jonathan Jones lives and works in Rome where he teaches English and American literature at John Cabot University.
​
Instagram: anfield75
Facebook: J.D.Jones
LinkedIn: Jonathan Jones
She Served Herself Up
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She served herself up like food, like bread
Written on a gravestone, College of Mt. St. Vincent, NY
like drink, like wine, and the children got drunk on her,
but the next morning didn’t remember her at all.
like air after the grass is mown. They closed the windows
and turned on the air conditioner.
like water, like the sea, and they built a fleet,
traversed her in the furious search for their own destinations.
like a pillow, like a resting place for their heavy heads. They left
their shapes on her, forgot to fluff her back up in the morning.
like a magician, like a claque hat, like the bunny pulled from the claque hat,
and they begged to learn the trick, but, as soon as they understood...
like a flower, like a peony in the garden after the rain, heavy
on the stalk, bending toward the ground from which she came,
but they rarely sat in the garden, on account of the mosquitos
she sometimes served herself up like,
so she could take something
flowing and vibrant back from them.
​
​​​​​
By Maya Bernstein​
Maya Bernstein’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the the Beloit Poetry Journal, On the Seawall, Pensive Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, The Laurel Review, The Passionfruit Review, Vita Poetica, and elsewhere. Her first collection is There Is No Place Without You (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022) and second, House Woman: Who Can Find Her? is forthcoming from Ben Yehuda in 2027. Maya teaches leadership, dialogue, and facilitation design, and facilitates gatherings which help groups and organizations adapt and change.
Website: mayabernstein.com​
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
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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
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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
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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