P – Rattle Seeking Submissions for Their: Tribute to Late Bloomers

Our Fall 2025 issue will be dedicated to poems written by “late bloomers”—those who only started publishing poetry regularly after the age of 50. Much ado is made in the literary world of younger poets making waves, but it’s never too late to develop and share your voice, and for many poets, their best work comes at an older age. We hope this issue will be an inspiration to those just starting out, and a counter to age-related biases.

Include a contributor’s note about when you starting publishing poetry significantly, and how that prior life experience affects you as a poet. We don’t publish essays, but always include a contributor notes section, which functions as a series of micro-essays about the topic.

You may submit up to four previously uncurated poems (or pages of short poems) at the same time, either in a single file or up to four files. Do not include your name or contact info within the file content. Do not submit more work in this category until we’ve replied.

Overview:

• Rattle does not accept work that has been previously curated, in print or online—poems may be self-published on social media, blogs, or message boards, but cannot have been published in books, magazines, or similar collections open to the public. We want to be the first publisher to highlight the poems, but never want to discourage anyone from sharing their poems themselves. For more on this, read “Uncurated: The Case for a New Term of Art.”
• Rattle does not accept work that has been predominantly generated by artificial intelligence. Poetry is a tool for expanding the human spirit, which means poems should be written by humans. It is possible to use A.I. toward that aim in some cases, so if used A.I. to assist in the writing process, please explain in the notes to your submission.
• Simultaneous submissions are encouraged.
• Contributors to the print magazine receive $200 and a complimentary one-year subscription. Poems for “Online” categories receive $100.
• All submissions are automatically considered for the annual Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, a $2,000 prize judged by the editors.

VERY IMPORTANT:

1. Submissions cannot be revised after submission. Note that typos and minor changes never affect our decisions—proofreading is what editors are for. If you’ve made a significant mistake, use the internal messaging system to send a new file as an attachment.
2. To withdraw a single poem from a submission of multiple poems, just log in, click on the submission, and send a message to let us know which you’d like removed. Do not withdraw the entire submission—if you do, the submission will no longer be active and we won’t see it.
3. Don’t include any contact information in the file(s) that you submit. Your name and contact info will be included in the Submittable fields, and this will make it easier for us to read fairly.

For more detailed information about rights, rules, privacy, and payments for publication, see our full guidelines.

NOTE: Please don’t query to ask if we have a reply to your submission yet. If the status says “received” or “in-progress,” then it’s received and in-progress. We always go as fast as we can, but we’re only human and the submission flow waxes and wanes, so response times vary considerably.