Submissions - Regular Issues

Reading schedule for 2024:

January 1-7
October 1-7

What to submit:

Individual poems - Please submit 4-5 one-line poems of any variety, including monostich haiku, senryu, nanoku, one-line tanka, poetic fragments, one-line micropoems, or lyrical lines. Be creative: Poems may be one word in length up to a column’s width, written horizontally, vertically, or as a concrete poem* in any shape a line may take (e.g. circle, squiggle, arrow, square, etc . . .) For vertical one-liners we are looking for poems with ONLY one word or part of a word per line. Such poems must work as single-line poems with the display enhancing the meaning.

Sequences and multi-ku - Please submit up to 5 sequences and/or multi-ku comprised of two - eight single-line poems. Poems may link and shift between each one (or poet, if collaborating) but are not required to. Feel free to submit any format you like. Titles are optional.

Submissions may be a mix of any of the above, up to 5 total.

Or send us something we’ve never seen in one line!

Cover Art - Please submit 3 -5 pieces and you may include a link to your website if you’d like us to link back.

Send us poems that are an expression of how you see or interpret the world—poems only you could write. We love communion with nature, journeys of transformation and healing, personal explorations and boundary-pushing, and honest experiences of the poet. While we do publish senryu and humancentric poems, most of the poems we publish incorporate nature elements or are grounded in nature.

We will consider found poems that take on their own meaning and veer significantly from the source work. Please provide source info and screenshots or erasures of the areas where you selected your choice words.

How to submit:

Submit your poems via the Google form using the Submit button below.

*FOR CONCRETE POEMS AND OTHER IMAGES, complete the Google form and type out the poem in one text box, then email images as attachments to whiptailjournal@gmail.com. If you use imaging software with letters only, please use a transparent background and send jpeg or png in 600 DPI. If you use Google Docs or MS docs to make your poem, please send as a Google Doc or .doc/.docx. The font we use is Nunito, so you may want to consider if it will affect your presentation.

FOR COVER ART, follow the above but place titles in place of “poem” in the form.

FOR SEQUENCES AND MULTI-KU, follow the same steps but type title in place of poem and email your sequence (paste into body of email for simple formatting as well as in addition to any images you may send of any special formatting).

Response time:

No simultaneous submissions, please. We will respond to all submissions. We aim to do so within 4-6 weeks; please check your emails. Also, double-check that there are no typos in your email address when you submit.

Link will go live when the submission window reopens.

We do not publish any of the following:

anything racist
anything misogynistic
anything xenophobic
anything homophobic
anything transphobic
anything ableist
religion flaming
violence or graphic death (including animals); death as a topic is fine in a memorial sense (e.g. grief, longing, etc.).
pornographic imagery
appropriation of any kind

Rights and terms:

All submitted work must be your original and previously unpublished work. This means poems have not appeared on social media or personal sites or blogs as we want to be the first venue to present your poem to the public (closed/private workshops are fine). This also means the work was written by you and not in any part by any AI program. Include your name as you wish it to appear in publication.

whiptail retains the right to publish your work on our website and social media accounts. All rights return to the author upon publication. whiptail reserves the right to reuse work that has appeared in the journal, with proper citation, in any future print or electronic collections or anthologies. If the author wishes to later republish the work, whiptail requests that you cite the journal as the venue of first publication.

Payment:

whiptail is a non-paying market.

Accolades:

whiptail considers all of the poems we publish for awards such as The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for Individual Poem, Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, Red Moon Anthology, The Haiku Reader, and more.