SONTAG MAG
SONTAG MAG
Sontag Mag is a literary magazine publishing poetry, poetry-in-translation, and interviews triannually.
SUBMISSIONS
Sontag Mag accepts submissions of poetry and poetry-in-translation in January, May, and September.
SPRING/SUMMER 2026
Columns at Sontag Mag are published triannually during the months of February to March, June to July, and October to November and include On the Diary by Anna Erre, In the Palm of the Erotic by Jenna Martínez, Alternate Address by Aanji Sin, and Off-Season by Sontag Mag Contributors.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Sting of Empty Bitterness and its Pleasure
“So here do I lie, / spent and flaccid as a lake in the sunset, / a blush of birds kissing nocturne from its surface.”
That Night, We Walked along the Dan River
“the wooden waterwheels, the peach blossoms, / that mirror themselves by the water. / These small things of the ages / all know us.”
Instructions for Having a Mother
“Look, this is / my sweet home. Tell the teacher / it’s abandoned, impossible, scary / to enter because of a bad monster / living inside, hungry for me.”
thisbe on the walls
“Once, a man in Afghanistan commanded his wife to be veiled from sound entirely. Once, a person can enter a house / only to find there is no door behind them, just a vast endless corpse of wood blocking their way.”
Good Grief Ghazal
“My mother makes a midnight mass of girlhood grief. / I am her devoted disciple by God and umbilical. / Like Isaac, not listening will do me no good, grief.”
i’ve always wanted to fistfight god a little
“i withstood hell — lovers, / mostly — for the promise of heaven and was doled / out a second dose of hellfire. then a third, a fourth.”
Accidental Geometries
“I think of all these people leaving / themselves in brief windows. / How some ascensions are linear.”
Navigating the Night
“I wonder if the black bear / I glimpsed earlier, roaming fields / of wildflowers, prowls now, seeking / a midnight feast.”
Dear Pine Forest II by Gustav Klimt,
“I never wanted children so naturally / I had them. All my daughter cells hate me. / All the places I’ve kissed bad men / have closed down.”
Amarys Dejai in Conversation with Chinese-American Writer and Filmmaker Haolun Xu
“I often write under the rule that poetry is best written as a way to document life both inside and outside of the poet.”
Durga’s Homecoming
“At the cusp of Ashtami and Navami, / the Goddess slays the Asura. In the fields, / corpses of adolescent girls sway / under the branches of peepul, / as gently as the flowering grass.”
Uncollected love letter (sunflower)
“People ask what i’ve been reading and i say the beats so they’ll go away bukowski might also work i / just want to walk with you not in some time warp but here where the trees break the sidewalk into / dips and precipices”
WINTER AND THE RIVER
“The stars look down / with neither discomfort / nor sympathy, / and the friends I had, / I now rarely see.”
How to disappear a heart
“Forget languages have meaning beyond the lines / you can see on the map. Bear in mind, a heart is a piece no one has / ever seen before, do not try to describe it, do not try to speechify the gaps.”
Meet the Sontag Team
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Asheley Nova Navarro
FOUNDING EDITOR
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Aiman Tahir Khan
ASSOCIATE POETRY EDITOR
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Aanji Sin
POETRY READER
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Aanya Mehta
POETRY READER
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Anna Erre
COLUMNIST
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Jai Michelle Louissen
POETRY READER
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Suzanne Claridge
POETRY READER
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Amarys Dejai
STAFF INTERVIEWER
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Rishi Janakiraman
STAFF REVIEWER
Sontag Mag Est. 2023
Sontag Mag is a literary magazine appearing triannually and devoted to fostering a community of poets and translators and promoting works exceptional in craft.