Variant Literature

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Variant Literature is a small press and magazine. http://variantlit.com Summer 2026 issue out now!

Variant Poetry Prize shortlist!
Excerpt from the story "Out of Gas" from Variant issue 23: "You could be management, baby. Think about what we could have then! Land-survey the cak outta them. Then, once the LCP is done, we can go on vacation to the COINS or the Iberian Republic or Rio if we’re feeling de fête, whatever you like.” Whatever I like? thought the Foreigner. That was, unofficially at least, the Great National slogan. A sort of promise, like a long-bastardized dream. You can do or be whatever you like, but nothing in this Great Nation is free. You have to work for the cost of freedom. But what a freedom that could be! After a year, five, a decade. The monopolocratic dream. To pay with time to climb the corporate ladder, and from the top look down and know true liberty: the opportunity for fame, power, wealth."
Variant Literature is excited to announce Write Weirder Fiction: On Leaning into Your Own Strangeness, a free fiction workshop led by Brandon Ahmad Haffner. Thursday, June 18th, 2026 Time: 4:00 PM PT /  6:00 PM CT / 7:00 PM ET Duration: 90 minutes Live on Zoom
To the city next to the city       of evaporated milk: I pledge my undead river,    my peach-soaked August. Cowshit underpits of a spring gone soft. I pledge it: my gray skies       scabbed green. The cottonwoods’ insistent cavort. (From "Anthem" by Ashley Varela)
what remains (i) by Jessica Popeski an opulence of cards. thinking of you. vases spill terra-cotta carnations. mother die mushrooms. moonflowers burst. a cold snap.
It Was Never Supposed To Be by Ben Kline is the 2026 Lambda Literary Award Winner for Gay Poetry
At the National Gallery Paul Potts You see the million hands. Yes, have they touched them? Do they feel what I have felt: the million hands in the mind pointing and prodding while I wait for a painting I have never seen except in the movies?
"Behind the house, horses’ necks stick out above wooden fences bloomed with lichen, none of them having been put down, and wisteria, purple and pendulous, planted by my mom and tended to by my sister, before one died and the other stopped speaking to me, hangs down from the latticed arch..."
The Garden of Hands by Elena Zhang Start the morning off with a handshake. Pick the one with unfurled fingers, reaching towards sunlight. Be gentle, but firm. Note the texture of the skin. If rough and dry, shower with kisses until the veins are rivers.
Poem: Jane Goodall’s Hologram Comforts Tapioca, Earth’s Last Remaining Chimpanzee by Jared Beloff There are memories that remain across generations like single-use plastic, the wind shaking the trees. We are sorry. Do you forgive us for our dividends and fixed mortgages, the satisfaction in the sound of roots pulled from the ground, each snap of bone.
I’ll Love You Forever, I’ll Like You for Always—after Robert Munsch by Daniel Lurie I propped Mom’s head up, all ten thousand pounds of her skull, so she could watch the robins fashion their nest atop the dead AC. I’m tired, she said. I fed her cracked lips blue pills. I took one and rolled it in my palm like a tiny egg. I rationed her time with the window, sunlight shattered the usual slick pitch
2026 Variant Lit Poetry Prize closes June 15
Remote Work by Lyn Li Che I turn off my video mid-Zoom. Outside, the moon palms its time card, apron already hung up. The wall sweats. Even the air struggles to breathe. Twelve hours behind, my CEO whirs onscreen, part time-traveler, part sentient Patagonia vest.
The Naming by Sara Hovda Like a current I was always the liquid bent, practicing its voice, but the naming—creek— came later.
From poem The St. John’s River by Christa Fairbrother: Ducks flew aloft in long lines, bullet trains rocketing to the next stop. Their reflection’s magnetism pushing, more than wings pulling, a hovering wind rush, a whistle, an explosive quack.
Prose The Hollow by N.D. Stone Exposure by David Ryan Polynesian Fish by Yitzchak Friedman Micro Series by Joseph Randolph In a different world, I am not a stranger to this ranch by Katherine Plumhoff Graydough by Adina Levine Chasing Leviathan by Phillip Hall Nightstands by Alex Rost Something by Nick Dmytrow Out of Gas by Spencer Brownstein The Peony Ant by Nora Maynard
Poetry The St. John’s River by Christa Fairbrother The Naming by Sara Hovda *** Remote Work by Lyn Li Che I’ll Love You Forever, I’ll Like You for Always by Daniel Lurie Jane Goodall’s Hologram Comforts Tapioca, Earth’s Last Remaining Chimpanzee by Jared Beloff *** The Garden of Hands by Elena Zhang At the National Gallery by Paul Potts *** what remains (i) by Jessica Popeski Disappearing Act by Ann DeVilbiss Anthem by Ashley Varela *** ocean nocturne by Chimezie Umeoka Octopus Years by Jason Zhang
A note from Todd Dillard, judge of the Variant poetry contest, on what he's looking for: I am interested in poems that show me the marvel underneath. I am most interested in poems that hook me immediately, with startling images and a compelling voice, and that end in ways I could never see coming. I love humor, surrealism, absurdity, narrative, and interiority.
Variant Literature is excited to announce Write Weirder Fiction: On Leaning into Your Own Strangeness, a free fiction workshop led by Brandon Ahmad Haffner. Thursday, June 18th, 2026. Time: 4:00 PM PT /  6:00 PM CT / 7:00 PM ET Duration: 90 minutes. Live on Zoom. Free to attend.
Variant Literature is excited to announce Trusting the Image: List Poems, a free poetry workshop led by writer Ashley Kim. Thursday May 21 at 6pm PST.
Todd Dillard's work has appeored in American Poetry Review, Guernica, Fairu Tale Review, The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, Waxwing, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. His debut collection Ways We Vanish Okau Donkeu Press) was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. His chapbook Ragnarok at the Father-Dauahter Dance is available from Variant Literature. A finalist for the 2025 AWP Donald Hal Poetry Prize, he lives outside Philadelphia, where he works as an editor and writer.
Now open! 2026 Variant Lit Poetry Prize, for a single, exceptional poem. Judged by Todd Dillard.
Variant Literature is excited to announce the inaugural Variant Lit Poetry Prize judged by Todd Dillard. Submissions May 15 to June 15.
Trusting the Image: Writing List Poems, a Variant poetry workshop led by Ashley Kim. May 21, 2026 at 6pm PST.
Photo of plum blossoms against a blue sky with Variant logo and text "flash prose and poetry"
Best of the Net 2026
Variant Lit is open for submissions of prose and poetry. Photo by staff member of the moon in the trees in the pacific northwest.
Variant Lit open for submissions of poetry, fiction, flash, and speculative.
Division I Boyfriend tells me to stop crying. To be quiet. To sit. He can’t be stressed now. If we lose to State, he might get angry. He might do something. Someone might get hurt. He doesn’t say it, but I know that someone might be me. “That’s how important this is, Babe,” he says. He thrashes fists. “State’s no joke!”
"In the glowing lobby of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, one is to choose one’s skater. Hair type, board. One can even be an alien or Jesus"
Excerpt from "Mermua" by Gerardo Mercado "Dear Carm, about your living dead man by the river, I believe you. Puerto Rico has many wonderful things about it—the people, the nature, the food and culture—but its other side, the violent side, the painful and macabre side, is just as real, just as real as us anyway, and, well, last week, I think I saw the devil in the woods."
Terracotta by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja "You’re drinking the wax he’s seethed for you, frothing the stained-glass flute in which his grandmother hoarded lavender talcum. Do you feel guilty yet? The wax is filmy with salt; not his first Saturday frittered with waiting on you, tilted towards the street. Last week the flat was cold and you chipped candles with a blunt butter knife. The bathroom door was bolted..."
He unwraps the egg and cress sandwich from its wax paper but doesn’t eat it. Outside, the town rolls past in rows of red-brick terraces. A small boy drags a stick along the ground, scratching a line into the heart of the sidewalk. A black-and-white border collie tied to a lamppost with a bright red scarf in place of a leash. Its head tilts as it watches the brown pods of a laburnum tree fall.
roadkill season by Kathy Jiang i want to be teeth to teeth, i said yesterday. with you. out of love, you took it as language more languid in its absurdity than alarmingly, routinely urgent. when we touched in the first year, i thought i would bite right through your face: rabid, carefree rabbit, unaware of the dead...
Excerpt from the story "You Deserve This" by Nicholas Claro: "Beckett’s eyes are deep green. Like his mother’s, a deep jade. It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but in the initial months after his mother and I separated, there were times I’d notice a physical feature they share—primarily their eyes—and find myself resenting him, resenting the resemblance."
He gets the mail, reads all of it, even the T-Mobile phone stuff, the “Your car warranty has expired!” The Sam’s Club brochure. The TV is on inside, mainly for the noise, the laughter and the clapping. He’s tired, just getting the mail; almost got stuck outside. Embarrassing.
Excerpt from "Mirror Listing, No Refunds" by Stefanie Lee: "I try not to explain. Like photographing a mirror to sell online, I crop the fatigue out with a surgeon’s precision. Angle the frame to hide the worst of it—misfire in my muscles, the way my spine leans as a question no one dares to ask. Still, evidence leaks in..."
Excerpt from "Snake Lake" story by Rebecca van Laer from Variant issue 22: "No—for years, Emma has been like the lake: She’s been open to whoever comes. Maybe this is her problem. Still, shouldn’t Daisy at least try to console her? 'OK,' Daisy says. 'It actually feels kind of nice once you’re moving a little.'"
Excerpt from poem Vultures by Jane Zwart, from Variant issue 22: "When my favorite aunt died, her daughter went through her jewelry. It was not precious as rubies are precious. It was precious as strangeness is precious. Or time."
Excerpt from "The Daddy Factory" by Christian Fuller from Variant issue 22: "Turns out the factory didn’t put this one together right, so he wasn’t gonna be my daddy, like all the other daddies they’d messed up, but at least the factory people gave Mama a hundred bucks because she had to practice the mommy job, the cooking and the cleaning and the kissing all mommies do."
Excerpt from the poem "Flying Geese in Orbit" by Christie Buchovecky from Variant issue 22 Sixteen colors of nanofiber— unraveled from ancient photon sails and spooled into thread. Cluttered worktable. Plasma cutter. Diamond-tipped needles. Three stubborn women—and a wish.
From the poem "Dog Museum" by Arielle Kaplan, from Variant issue 22: "I ask M. if other animals can visit the museum: What about turtles? Sadly, he says, no. You have to be a dog or have a dog to get in."
Excerpt from poem "Love Is a Fruit" by Grace H. Zhou: "A soft yellow fig, bruised from its fall. I was a bad guest..."
Excerpt from a story, "The Replacements" by Rowan MacDonald, from issue 22: "They began arriving soon after the federal investigation. Smiling faces were replaced with humanoid robots and computerized voices. They didn’t have names for us to remember, only cold expressions lacking soul. We could hear them moving through the hallways in the night."
Except from "What I Mean to Say Is This Isn’t About Aliens" by T. De Los Reyes in Variant Lit Issue 22: "Back when my parents were inventing new ways to disappoint each other across the dinner table, I was often watching Mulder and Scully chase aliens and the idea of evidence like any of us knew what to believe in anymore. 1993 smelled like evaporated milk and resentment ..."
Variant Lit Issue 22 prose from Joey Hedger, S. H. Woodgeard, Rowan MacDonald, Nicholas Claro, Christian Fuller, Elizabeth Rosen, S. L. Johnson, Chrissy Stegman, Rebecca van Laer, and Gerardo J. Mercado.
Celebrating our issue 22 poetry contributors: T. De Los Reyes Kathy Jiang Stefanie Lee Arielle Kaplan Christie M Buchovecky Jane Zwart Grace H. Zhou Lalini Shanela Ranaraja Nick Daoust DL Pravda Jeff Whitney Guinotte Wise
The Weight of Small Moments: A Jane Kenyon Study on Feb 26th at 6PM PT, a free workshop hosted by Variant Literature.
Variant Lit: 12 more days to submit poetry or prose. Variantlit.com/submit
Variant Literature Pushcart Prize nominations for 2026: “On Craft” by Erica Dawson “Clutch” by Stephanie Frazee “Holes” by Nicole Desjardins Gowdy “Cooking Lesson” by Shira Haus “Five O’Clock Shadow in Philly” by Allen Means “The Opposite of Dusk” by Ron Riekki
Variant Lit open for submissions. Submit your poetry, flash, or fiction to Variant by December 4.
Variant Lit Monarch Queer Literary Awards 2026 nominees: Parker Logan, Oliver Brooks, Michael Agunbiade, Hongwei Bao, Shauna Friesen, Isaiah Gardner, Kit Evans
Photo of Japanese maple tree with orange leaves in fall against blue sky. Text: Variant Lit open all November for poetry and prose. Free subs. We pay $10.
Screenshot of open categories for Variant submissions: flash prose or micro series, literary fiction, speculative fiction, or poetry.
Screen shot of Variant Literature's submissions page: open in all categories.
Text on blue background: "we're open for submissions" and "submit your poetry, flash prose, and fiction to Variant Literature between October 21 and December 4"
Variant logo with text: "publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction" and "we're excited to announce that magazine submissions for poetry and prose open October 21, 2025"
Variant Lit mag logo on photo of moon in blue afternoon sky with text POETRY AND PROSE SUBMISSIONS OPEN OCTOBER 21
Text from the poem The Single Life by Jeremy Radin: A couple was picnicking in the park. I was there to go to the public garden for a couple sprigs of wild rosemary to tuck into my stew. A little songbird alighted as I passed them, its little face a spray of scarlet. The boyfriend said Wow, what a lovely bird, it’s got such gorgeous coloring. & I did not say it then, but I knew that it was blood— two blocks away a flock of them had slaughtered & picked clean a horse.