Open Journal Poetry 2026
Many thanks to all the poets who continue to submit to Superlative.
Here are the fantastic poems we have selected we have selected for our open journal in 2026.
If you would like us to consider your poetry for publication, please submit here.
Enjoy!
Night Note
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Suppose, as dusk dismantles day,
fatigue is a brass string tensioned
down the vertebrae, it is possible
for the body to become its own violin,
bowing its lonely key. Under quilts
and starlight, a mother of two
daughters, after they are sound
asleep, stops pretending to watch
a soap opera to marvel at her older
daughter’s poetry strewn in balled
legal paper up and down the stairs.
Hunched on the landing with a mug
of mint leaves and lung cancer, blue
eyes brushing her daughter’s words,
sweeping, cleaning the stairwells
as darkness litters the sky. Out the window
are swooning stars up there to notice.
Her kitchen baked body can answer
with its lonely key, its bowing, repeated,
like lines in her daughter’s villanelles.
Out there, the peach trees are composing
almost identical breaks from their humble
cradle soil, to the lonely key
of their gold ripening flesh.
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​​By Grace Lynn​
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.​
On Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
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The city holds its breath.
Glass glows like a held thought,
a pane of light stitched
into the dark.
Inside, coffee never cools.
Words never quite arrive.
A man turns his back to the world,
wearing silence like a coat.
A woman cups loneliness
between red-painted lips.
Her companion stares past her,
past the counter,
past whatever hope walked in earlier
and left no tip.
The waiter waits—
forever mid-gesture
forever almost asking
how they are doing
and already knowing the answer.
No door opens.
The street offers nothing
but empty angles
and the promise of morning
that no one mentions.
I stand outside the frame,
face pressed to the invisible glass,
recognizing the hour
when thoughts grow loud
and company feels optional.
Some nights we choose the light
without choosing each other.
Some nights we sit together
and practice being alone.
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By Ridley Longsworth​
Ridley Longsworth attends Radnor High School in Wayne, Pennsylvania, USA, where she plays on the tennis team and is a member of the Asian Culture Club. Her writing has appeared in The Radish, and her short story “The Rusty Hubcap” has been accepted for publication in the June 2026 issue of Blue Marble Review. She is the recipient of an American Voices Award, a Scholastic Gold Medal Writing Award, and a Scholastic Gold Key Writing Award.
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Instagram: @ridley.the.writer​
What We Breathe
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You’re leaving soon, I say, the July heat
burley-leaf yellow, humus char rising
in waves above the gravel drive, half-beat
staccato whirr of locusts surprising
only the silence. Yes, you nod and trace
a fingertip down the side of the glass,
then stand and walk inside, that hint of grace
I’ve seen a hundred times before. And last
night, bare shoulders shadowed in moon’s blue
light, you turned and told me, Breathe. Breathe
deep. For nothing in this wide world can smooth
the furrowed brow like the breath of love—ease
into the dream where words turn flesh to proof
of shared tomorrows. And now, the scented
air reminds me of every time we’ve ended.
​
By Tony Morris
Along with his debut novel, Deep River Blues, and four books of poetry, including his latest, 'Pulling at a Thread', Tony Morris's work has also been widely published in anthologies and journals. His poems have been awarded the Louisiana Literature Prize, and the Tennessee Writers Alliance Poetry Award along with multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife, four children, two cats, and a dog in a farmhouse nestled in the Southeast. He’s the associate editor of Southern Poetry Review, and director of the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat.
In Another Room
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They say—
(and I’m no physicist, you know that)—
that if the universe refuses to end,
if it keeps spilling outward,
and the pieces that build it are finite,
then sooner or later everything that can happen will happen,
must happen—
again and again,
until there are no new songs left to sing.
​
The same faces,
the same hands reaching across the same tables,
only the chairs a little different,
the laughter a beat earlier,
the yes instead of the almost.
And somewhere in all that sprawling symmetry,
there’s another me.
Another you.
Another room like this one—
only brighter.
Maybe he is better with you than I was.
Maybe the hurt never finds its teeth.
Maybe you both wake on a Sunday,
and the only ache between you
is from laughing too hard the night before.
And maybe he says it—
on time, in time—
so cleanly it never frays.
Maybe he never knows how close it came to breaking,
because it never does.
And if he does—
Goddamnit, if he does—
I would not take that from him.
​
Even if I could.
Even if I could unstring myself,
tear through every stubborn particle,
thread my body through the eye of whatever needle
holds the universe together,
I would not knock at his door.
Because someone always loses.
In the thousands,
and thousands,
and thousands of rooms,
someone was always going to stand alone in the quiet.
Someone had to carry the weight of almost.
​
When the quarks tumbled,
when the dice were cast,
when the strings stitched the cosmos
into you and me,
and not-you and not-me,
it was always going to be someone.
This time, it’s me.
And that’s all right.
Because in a thousand other rooms,
maybe I never even found you.
Maybe I never even knew your name.
Maybe I lived and died,
and the sky never bent low enough
to let me hear you laugh.
But here—
at least—
I loved you.
I lost you.
But I loved you first.
And that is more than most universes
would ever dare to promise.
I am no physicist.
I don’t know how the stars stumble back
into their old mistakes,
how matter folds itself into near-perfect echoes,
how the same dust can spell a thousand poems
and still call them all love.
I only know:
somewhere, in another room,
you are laughing.
Somewhere, in another room,
I am holding your hand.
Somewhere, in another room,
the sun rises just for us.
And that is enough for me.
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By Erik Bodien
Erik Bodien is a student of social anthropology at the London School of Economics. His poems explore intimacy, loss, and the quiet absurdity of being alive.
IG: @u.vers