Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press

Thanks for your interest in publishing your work on One Sentence Poems.  Please note that we share this Submittable site with our mother publication, Right Hand Pointing. So, don't be confused if you get email from us with Right Hand Pointing, or Ambidextrous Bloodhound in the subject line. It's us!

One Sentence Poems is edited by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Clare Rolens, Natalie Wolf, and Dale Wisely.

We publish one-sentence poems in issues that appear twice a year. 

Rules:

• Your poem must be one true, grammatical sentence. Use correct punctuation and capitalization.
• The poem may be titled, or not. We prefer a title. It is okay to make the title the beginning of a sentence and the body of the email the end of the sentence. 
• Start with an uppercase letter. End with a terminal punctuation mark. (But don't die.)
• Any line format, but at least one line break. (2 lines, or many lines. 1 stanza or multiple stanzas. Should be left-justified, however. Some idents ok, but we can't handle highly scattered formats. Include at least one line break.)

Avoid using multiple sentences separated by semi-colons. And really, no semi-colons. We're really looking for sentences and not constructions that strain the meaning of that term. 

We also encourage non-English sentences, accompanied by English translation. If we accept your poem in another language, we will publish the translation with it. We'd love to see more translations.

   For a complete submission we'll need:

• your one-sentence poem(s). You may include up to 4 in a single submission. Please do not send more than four.
• your brief ONE SENTENCE  bio. If you'd like for us to add a link in your bio, we're glad to do so. The bio should in the 3rd person, one sentence only, and no more than about 35 words.
   

Thanks! We look forward to seeing your work.

The Editors

We read 6 weeks on and 6 weeks off. Here's our current schedule.

We accept submissions:

• Nov 1 - Dec 15 for our January issue
• Feb 1 - Mar 15 for our April issue
• May 1 - Jun 15 for our July issue
• Aug 1 - Sep 15 for our October issue.

Unbroken is a quarterly online journal that seeks to showcase prose poems, both from established and emerging voices. We desire to give the block, the paragraph, the unlineated prose, a new place to play. Or to crash on the couch for a while after breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend.
 

WHAT TO SUBMIT:
We seek prose poems. We do not publish lined poetry. Our strong preference is for a single block of text, maybe two, per piece. More than that, we start arguing about whether it's a prose poem! Don't make us argue. Some of our editors are already dangerous.

To get some idea of the kind of content we like, check out current and past issues. 

The editors of Unbroken seek prose poems that transcend the boundaries of conventional storytelling. Of course, we believe that submissions should be coherent and intelligible, but also that coherence can be achieved through style, tone, imagery, and even transgressive methods. Linear narratives with predictable situations and language will be discounted. We want prose that smolders in the ditch. We want it to cry. Maybe laugh at inappropriate times. We want it to knock on our doors in the middle of the night and demand to be let in, fed, given black coffee, and assured that life isn’t completely insane. We want prose poems that have been fired from multiple jobs and have gaps in their resumes that cause them to perspire in interviews. Poems that listened to “Venus in Furs” daily for the entire year of 1993. We want poems that are the perfect carrot cake at your aunt’s house. We want poems that need extensive dental work because of unfortunate incidents outside bars in Phoenix or Indianapolis or Mobile. Finally, we want submission guidelines that don’t read like Dale Wisely got his hands on them.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
We read 6 weeks on and 6 weeks off.
In any given reading period, submit no more than 2 pieces. If you submit more than two pieces, only the first two will be read.
We do final acceptances for each issue shortly after the end of each reading period.
 

UNPUBLISHED WORK ONLY:
We do not accept previously published works (including self-publishing and blogs). Simultaneous submissions are okay (please tell us if it is a simultaneous submission), but please let us know immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
 

LENGTH:
We do not have a rigid word limit, but we tend to favor shorter, punchier pieces. If you send us something that’s more than 500 words, it really needs to sock our hosiery off.
 

COVER LETTERS/BIO:
Cover letters are not essential, but please provide a brief (around 50 words) third-person bio in your email. We reserve the right to edit bios.
 

FORMATTING:
Do not supply line breaks. We are looking for blocks of text. Hey. We see your right pinky creeping toward that RETURN key. Don't do it! Save yourself! Ok, we are not necessarily opposed to 1 paragraph break but prefer a single block of text. At what point will these guidelines have beaten that point to death?
 

EDITING:
If your work is accepted, we may fix at our discretion minor grammatical or spelling problems. For anything more involved, you will be contacted for clarification. We are unable to provide feedback on work we do not accept.
 

We know your rights:
If your work is accepted, you agree to give Unbroken first serial electronic rights to your work and nonexclusive electronic and print rights in perpetuity. This means we can archive your work on our website indefinitely and include it in potential future publications and anthologies. Otherwise, all rights revert to the author upon publication.

If you publish the work elsewhere in the future, we ask that credit be given to Unbroken for first publication.

We cannot pay our contributors at this time. We do, however, promote our authors on social media and through our email list with about 700 subscribers.

Friends,

Thanks for getting this far!  To know if your work fits with moral injury as our theme, you need to know--if you don't already--what we mean by moral injury.

First, the experience of trauma, no matter how severe, does not necessarily (or even usually) lead to moral injury.

Moral injury occurs in two categories of circumstances. 

In the first, an individual engages in an act that is a transgression of that person’s own moral code and which has serious, even grave consequences. Or, the individual fails to do something when their moral code demanded they act with, again, serious consequences.  In the second category, a person is morally injured by seeing others engage in immoral behavior (with serious consequences). For example, combat military may have seen their colleagues or their superiors do egregious things.

In any case, moral injury occurs when the trauma causes a loss of faith or trust, or even hostility, toward authority, institutions, and even one’s perception of human morality. It has psychological, social,  and spiritual aspects.

The field of moral injury has been applied to combat veterans. Consider a Vietnam veteran who kills a noncombatant. Or who sees his or her own military leaders engage in incompetent, careless, reckless behavior that got people hurt or killed. That doesn’t just cause PTSD. It is an assault on the person’s moral faculties. 

Or consider a police officer whose line of work exposes him regularly to the worst kinds of conduct in human beings.

Another: Someone works for a government child protection office. They also see very bad human behavior, victimization of children, but also work in a system that doesn’t necessarily take good care of children and families.

Another: A driver engages in behavior in their car that distracts them and they cause an accident in which an innocent person is severely injured or killed. Subsequently, the driver realizes they had a moral duty to be attentive when driving and due to their negligence, terrible harm is done.

I have no length guidelines for poems. Previously published work will be considered, as long as we can quickly resolve any permission to reprint issues."  

Questions to me at dalewisely@gmail.com.

Thanks for submitting!  

Dale

We will publish a print anthology of poems on grief in 2025. This is a fundraiser for a non-profit on whose board I serve: Community Grief Support. https://www.communitygriefsupport.org/

I invite you to submit poems and creative nonfiction. 

Guidelines:

• Poems on loss, grief, mourning.
• Any form is acceptable. I continue to have a bit of an aversion to rhyme.
• Because I hope to get these out to readers who don’t normally read a lot of poetry, the poems would need to be more accessible than we tend to see in poetry journals. I don’t want to overstate this, because I still would hope to see poems that require focus and thought. I just don’t want readers to scratch their heads and say “huh?” TOO much.
• Creative Non-Fiction. Yeah. I don’t really know what it is either. So let’s say: First-person prose. Narrative.
• No more than 4 pieces.
• Deadline: March 1, 2025.

If your work is accepted--given this is a fundraiser in which ALL revenue will go to the non-profit, I will ask authors of accepted work to agree to purchase a copy. The price will not exceed $20. 

Thanks very much.

Dale

Thanks,

Dale