A Million Little Delights: Poetry Free Tip Jar Option

Since this call combines short fiction and poetry, we need to distinguish the payment structure because only the poetry gets the $30 flat rate. Based on your existing guidelines, I'd put:

WORD COUNT: Short fiction: 500–1,000 words. Poetry: up to 400 words.
PAYMENT: Short fiction is paid at $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Poetry is paid at a flat rate of $30 per accepted poem. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking short fiction and poetry that lingers.

We love work with a strong voice, vivid atmosphere, emotional complexity, and something alive beneath the surface. Give us characters we can't quite shake, images that stay with us, sentences we want to read twice, and poems that make us notice something differently.

We're open to work that is tender, funny, strange, romantic, unsettling, nostalgic, joyful, melancholy, playful, or some impossible combination of all of the above.

Above all, we want writing that makes us feel something.

The spirit we're after:

Nectar & Noose — a story about racism, Black womanhood, and the complicated act of remaining soft in a world that continually asks you to harden.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, emotional depth, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

For short fiction

We're drawn to character-driven stories with distinctive voices, compelling relationships, memorable settings, and emotional stakes.

Your story doesn't need an enormous plot. We're just as interested in what happens around a kitchen table, during a strange afternoon, between two old friends, or inside one consequential conversation as we are in larger narratives.

We're open to literary fiction, romance, speculative elements, humor, magical realism, and work that doesn't fit neatly into a category.

What matters most is that the story feels specific and inhabited.

For poetry

Send us poems with imagery, voice, feeling, and attention to language.

We're interested in poems about ordinary life and extraordinary moments, relationships, place, memory, identity, desire, beauty, grief, pleasure, girlhood, womanhood, family, friendship, home, change, and subjects we haven't thought to ask for yet.

We welcome experimentation, but we're especially drawn to poetry that invites the reader in rather than making her prove she belongs there.

What we're not looking for

We're not searching for work that simply matches an aesthetic or uses “cozy” as shorthand for substance.

Delight can exist beside grief. Beauty can exist beside anger. A story published in A Million Little Delights doesn't have to be cheerful.

It should simply have something worth noticing.

Send us the story or poem we’ll still be thinking about tomorrow.