We just deactivated our Twitter account and wow, that’s a weight lifted! Musk is a problem and he has been for a long time. We’ve been shifting our weight to Bluesky for a while, but we’re no longer content to lurk on Twitter or X or whatever Elon wants to call it anymore. The man has become a genuine and pressing threat to our democracy, and we definitely don’t want him or his impending terms of service (starting Nov 15th) using our writers’ work to train his large language models.

Hundreds of familiar faces popped up on Bluesky in the last few days, and we are buoyed and encouraged to see them. And fellow lit mags, for what it’s worth? We get comparable engagement on Bluesky with about an eighth of the followers we had on Twitter.

We look forward to a different culture, a different and more effective resistance, and the timeless medicine of poetry, all under bluer skies. Last one out turns off the lights.

Our winter issue is live, and we’re so excited to share this collection! Give it a look if you need a moment of poetry during a tumultuous election week. And to our American readers: please vote. Vote like the rest of your life depends on the outcome.

The Rust & Moth Autumn 2024 issue is now available in print! These poems are fire poems, and they stand at the border between the world that is and the world that is yet to come.

With new poetry from Laurie Klein, Sonya Schneider, Kurt Olsson, Aileen Cassinetto, Matthew Murrey, Sarah Burke, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Ron Stottlemyer, David Rosenthal, Ashley Steineger, Sam Szanto, Jeanann Verlee, Eric Brown, Samuel Prince, David Moolten, Karen Hildebrand, Beth McKinney, Lotte Mitchell Reford, Ela Kini, Amanda Auchter, Susan Barry-Schulz, Courtney Hitson, Andrea Maxine Recto, Luigi Coppola, Meredith Davies Hadaway, and Joseph Fasano.

An aside to our American readers: check your voter registration status early and often. We’ll see you at the crossroads on November 5th.

And to all our readers: we’ll see you in fields upon fields of poetry on Bluesky!

Thanks to a steady rise in submissions, we’ve decided to shorten our reading windows by one week. Effective now, we’ll be open to submissions from the 1st through the 21st of the usual reading months — March, June, September, and December. (Better, we hope, to balance the work and keep the issue from literally getting too heavy!)

Full details can be found on our submissions page: rustandmoth.com/submissions/

Rust & Moth’s Summer 2024 issue is live! This collection burns like a red flare on a rainy highway. Crack these pages for jackknifed lines of life, death, and decisions made.

Featuring new work from Lea Marshall, Lucy Rumble, Andy Young, Ken Hines, and more, we’ll be publishing new poems online every week and building toward a finalized print edition this June. Join us online as the issue unfolds!

Rust & Moth’s Spring 2024 issue is now available in print! These poems squint and strain through mist, through migraines, through floorboards, through closed blinds, blizzards, and grief unseen. What strange and luminescent creatures await us in the fog?

With new poetry from Nathan Manley, Krysten Hill, Allison Blevins, Lizzy Ke Polishan, Kylan Tatum, Stephen May, Rishi Janakiraman, Carson Wolfe, John Paul Caponigro, Tess Liegeois, Connor Watkins-Xu, Emma Harrington, Aaron Sandberg, Stefanie Leigh, Michelle Donahue, William Palmer, Suzanne Langlois, Jennifer Skogen, Aiman Tahir Khan, Ron Stottlemyer, Rosie Hong, Hannah L.D., Laura Tanenbaum, Susanna Stephens, Jackie Craven, Jennifer L Freed, Tanima, Richard Gallagher, Dilys Wyndham Thomas, Chris Talbott, Jennifer Fischer Davis, Karen McAferty Morris, Gary McDowell, and John Walser.

Find these and other poems on Bluesky. Also, ePub readers! We’re excited to announce the unveiling of our new free ePub format, which will accompany every print release going forward. Spring 2024 awaits you on Kindle and other e-readers.

Rust & Moth’s Winter 2023 issue is now available in print! These quiet, solstice-dark pieces rumble with buried light. Here lie bodies on fire, faerie ships, and ribs striking flint on steel.

With new poetry from Sarah Carleton, Katy Luxem, Katherine Norton, Avery Yoder-Wells, Nathaniel J Brown, Laurie Koensgen, John L. Stanizzi, Adeline Navarro, Carla Sarett, Anna Elkins, Heather Qin, Ana María Carbonell, Carolyn Williams-Noren, Caleb F. Stocco, Sarah Mills, Faith Allington, Charles Hensler, Ken Craft, Christopher Shipman, Erin Covey-Smith, Frank Paino, Ariana D. Den Bleyker, Raina K. Puels, Suzanne Langlois, Mary Simmons, Johanna DeMay, Christina Kallery, Laurie Klein, and Sascha Cohen.

Find these and other poems at our new home on Bluesky!

The Pushcart Prize honors the best of America’s small presses, and Rust and Moth’s nominations are in the mail! Please enjoy these fantastic pieces from this year’s nominees.

Black paintings, by Lisa Bickmore

Magdalene, by Amy Thatcher

Abecedarian For My Grandmother’s Missing Toe, by Arielle Kaplan

20/20 Lexicon, by Michael Bazzett

Going Home, by Suzanne Langlois

Peeled Apples, by Carly Wheelehan Gelsinger

Rust & Moth’s Autumn 2023 issue is now available in print! This one is a study in long-form — with deeper breaths before each piece, line-lengths that stretch for the horizon, and growing fear for the future and its weather. All of this in the service of an old and glowing collection of orchids, scales, roots, apples, ashes, paper… and feathers.

Rust & Moth’s Summer 2023 issue is now available in print! These pages roam the parchment of the west in search of life-sustaining water. Here you’ll find meditations on regret, the wisdom of desert fathers, and experiments with form, easier to see now that the water is gone.

Rust & Moth’s Spring 2023 issue is now available in print! This is a collection of vertical movement: rain falling, roots seeking rain, pears leaving branches, and feet lifting from the surface of the Earth.

With new poetry from Aliyah Cotton, Jonathan Lenore Kastin, Reyzl Grace, Annie Stenzel, Maria Surricchio, Kelly Gray, John Amen, Michelle Hendrixson-Miller, Jeff Ewing, Melanie McCabe, William G. Gillespie, Mackenzie Duan, Jingyu Li, B. Fulton Jennes, Emily Jaster, Jennessa Hester, Emily Ruth Verona, Lane Henson, Kent Leatham, Luke Johnson, Rashna Wadia, Dagne Forrest, Gus Peterson, Suzanne Langlois, and Daniel Revach.

You can also find full-length poems from the issue at Post, our new social media outlet: post.news/@rustandmoth

The Pushcart Prize honors the best of America’s small presses, and Rust and Moth’s nominations are in the mail! Please enjoy these fantastic pieces from our 2022 nominees.

Tender Is a Weakness I Keep Repeating, by Ann DeVilbiss

Utah, by Adriano Noble

Aubade for the Body (25), by Phoebe Reeves

Shrub, Blackbirds, Silence, by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí

Poem that Ends with Garden, by Lauren Elaine Jeter

Domestic, by Lea Page

Rust and Moth’s Autumn 2022 issue is now available in print! This issue is unavoidably present. In the present tense, tense, and a gift by any other name, these poems explore the pain and wonder of being here, now.

The Rust and Moth editors recently learned about some technical issues with our submission form. Our in-house submissions manager incorporates elements of Google technology, and it appears that recent updates on Google’s end temporarily disabled the form. Most form submissions from June 17th — June 30th were auto-discarded; emailed submissions during that time were unaffected.

We’ve now responded with a yes or no to every submission we received in June, so if you’re waiting for a response still, it means that your submission wasn’t received. We apologize for the trouble; we know how much care goes into prepping a submission and the inconvenience isn’t lost on us.

We should have everything up and running just fine by our next open reading window, which opens in September. Thanks for thinking of us, and sorry again for the hassle! We hope to read your work next time around.

Rust + Moth’s Summer 2022 issue is now available in print! This issue is about time – our collaboration with it, its war on us, and what time can do to a country, a language, a family, or a home.