Skip to content

[SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED] Call for Submissions: Magma 73, Changeling

Closing date: 31st August, 2018

The submissions window for ‘Changeling’ is open from 1st July – 31st August 2018.

We welcome poems that have not been previously published, either in print or online. Poems may be sent via Submittable, or by post if you live in the UK. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made.

*

I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs. The room fills
with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her
back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.
— Hieu Minh Nguyen, ‘Changeling’

Changeling

Not the film with Angelina Jolie, but the dark myth of a fairy child left in the place of a human one. A strange substitute. An other – the unheimlich, or uncanny. A spell given corporeal form.

In her essay on the Metaphysical ‘I’, Dorothea Lasky wrote: ‘The best gift that a poet can give his or her I is to allow it to be its own cool animal. An I that is a wild thing, a mercurial trickster that resists all definition. That is so close to a self (a self or the self)—and so far away from it at the same time––that the reader can’t help but see a real self in it.’

We are looking for poems that explore this almost-I, this not-quite-thing, poems that unsettle and beguile; that shape-shift or transform; that deal in magic, childhood, folklore and the unknown.

‘The Stone is a mirror which works poorly,’ wrote Charles Simic, ‘Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dim-/ness, who’s to say?’ If the poem is a mirror, what do you see staring back at you? Id or ego? Child or changeling?

We want to be surprised, seduced, unsettled and enchanted. Send us your dark poems, your strange or surreal poems, your metaphysical poems, your poems that aren’t who they say they are. Send us your poems of transformation!

We look forward to meeting your ugly babies.

Ella Frears and Richard Scott, Editors, Magma 73

*

Wanting to submit to Magma 73?  You may submit:

Up to 4 poems in a single Word document

Go to Submittable for more details.

Back To Top