Themed Poetry Call: "After the Fire, the Garden"

Deadline: August 20, 2026

Cetera Magazine’s third digital poetry issue turns toward aftermath. Toward the altered ground left behind by rupture. And the strange forms of life that begin there.

"After the Fire, the Garden" is an issue about what grows after devastation. We're interested in poems that understand renewal as complicated and unsentimental and achingly alive. The fire may be literal or symbolic. Ecological disaster, family fracture, illness, exile, political violence, spiritual crisis, heartbreak, inheritance, collapse. The garden does not promise that everything has been healed. It is merely what takes root in damaged soil.

Poetry we want to see:

We want poems that avoid easy redemption. Poems that know survival is not the same as restoration. Poems attentive to the labor of tending, the unruliness of regrowth, the stubbornness of weeds, the intimacy of rot, the beauty that arrives with consequence. A garden can be cultivated, but it can also be feral. A fire can destroy, but it can also clear, expose, transform, even purify.

For a good example of what kinds of poetry we typically accept, please take a look at our previous poetry issues: "The Body Keeps the Score" and "The Things That Survive Us."

Submission Guidelines:

Submit 1–3 poems per submission as a single PDF. There is no minimum or maximum line count, but we ask that you consider the pacing of a digital reading experience. Previously unpublished work only. Simultaneous submissions are accepted; please notify us immediately upon acceptance elsewhere.

We welcome work in translation. If submitting a translated poem, please include the original text and a brief note on the translation’s relationship to the source.

We accept all formal approaches: lyric, narrative, documentary, hybrid, erasure, prose poem, visual or scored work. If your submission contains unusual formatting, include a note in your cover letter.

Cover letters should be brief. Tell us your name, a brief bio, and whether any of the submitted poems are part of a larger project.

Response time is 1–2 weeks after the deadline. We read every submission.

Submit via email: ceterasubmissions@gmail.com. Subject line should be: Poetry Submission – After the Fire, the Garden.