Themed Poetry Call: "The Body Keeps the Score"

OPEN SUBMISSIONS For Cetera Issue Two: "The Body Keeps the Score" 

Deadline: March 19, 2026

Cetera's second digital poetry issue takes the body as its central location — the primary site of knowledge. We are interested in poems that treat physical experience as a philosophical and political condition: the body that stores what the mind has decided to move past, the body that carries histories it was never asked to hold, the body that communicates in a language that runs below and alongside words.

The title borrows from Bessel van der Kolk's landmark work on trauma, and we want both words held equally: body and score. Score as wound, as mark left. Score as notation. The system the body uses to record what language struggles to carry. A scar is a score. A flinch is a score. So is the way certain people hold their breath when authority enters a room.

We are looking for the seam between sensation and meaning. Poems that exist in the friction between those modes, that arrive at understanding the way the nervous system does: sideways, suddenly, without warning.

Poetry we want to see:

Work that stays in the body, present to it, accountable to its specific grammar. Poems where the body is a location; doing structural and emotional work on the level of image and argument both. Work that understands the body as historical: inherited, marked, contested, misread. Formal choices that enact the body's logic of breath, interruption, the sentence that can't complete itself. Poems that take seriously what the body knows that the speaking subject has yet to admit.

We are particularly interested in work that addresses the chronic pain body that has stopped being believed, the body navigating bureaucratic and institutional violence, the body in labor (in every sense of the word), the body remembering pleasure it was told not to have wanted, the body that has been translated across languages, geographies, or generations and arrived changed.

We want poems that stay present to difficulty rather than resolving it, that treat the body as a place the poem must reckon with and remain inside. We want formal ambition. We want poems that understand their shape as meaning.

For a good example of what kinds of poetry we typically accept, please take a look at our first issue.

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 and attach as a PDF.

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. We read every submission.

Submit via Email: [ceterasubmissions@gmail.com]. Subject line needs to be "Poetry Submission – The Body Keeps the Score."