If You Can…

I mentioned last week about my poetry acceptance, and here are the details as I promised!

My poetry class has helped me with more than just learning the art. Through the group I also came to know of Pena Literary Magazine.

They accept fiction, essays and poetry, from all around the world. And yes, they pay! You can check out their Submission Guidelines. At the very end, they state that they “pay an honorary amount of INR 1,000 per published piece.”

I’d sent them a bunch of poems a few months back. At the time there was no set theme. As always, I went through their old issues at the archive, and liked what I saw. I sent across what I thought was the best fit. But sadly, the batch earned a rejection, though a nice one.

Hardly a month later, I saw their submissions call for the theme of Happiness – something close to my heart. Luckily, I did have poems centered around positive happy themes. I sent 3 of them, and heard back with an acceptance in a month! They took one poem and I liked that they appreciated the other poems too.

They also asked for a picture showing joy, and you can see it on their cover page. On right side of the image is me in sunglasses smiling broadly on a trip I’d taken with family!

Check out the rest of the issue here: Pena, Issue #4 – The Anatomy of Joy

The poem I sent here is a Ghazal called ‘If you can.’ To learn more about what is a ghazal and read some samples check out Poets.org

Do have a read of the issue and my poem and let me know what you think! I’d like to return every week with news of more acceptances, but that sounds almost too good to be true so I’ll just post whenever I get something published.