delicate emissions poetry zine is a quarterly, brochure-sized zine that publishes poems of fifteen or fewer lines. We’re queer-run, anti-racist, pro-trans, and pro-liberation in our philosophy; though our poems aren’t necessarily explicitly about those ideas, they definitely don’t defy them and, at their best, embrace them.
We started as an email account, an Instagram account, and a Medium page in the basement of a house during a very wet Seattle autumn in 2021. Due to life circumstances, we moved to Alabama just a few weeks after our second issue was published. A third was released online-only, and we wondered if we’d be able to continue. After some time, our founder decided to stage a comeback, and it’s been nonstop since. We call those missing issues — missing due to trauma and sadness, then due to the reawakening that followed and required a lot of energy — “the ghost issues” and still count them in our numbering system.
In 2025, we moved to accepting submissions that may have been self-published by a poet on their own social media sites. This is an effort to embrace the new realities of publishing, and to push back against publications who would turn their nose up at any kind of self-publishing while also refusing to accept a submission that a poet had published on their own Instagram account or blog. We’re proud to feature work by established poets as well as those who are new to being published.
We provide a contributor’s copy to each poet with accepted work (so long as they provide us with a mailing address). Our goal is to become a paying market in the future through subscription payments and donations. Physical copies of the zine are available in our Ko-Fi shop; we publish an online issue as well. Past issues are available in links on our LinkTree for now. You can read our current issue now by clicking on that button!
An important thing to know about delicate emissions poetry zine is that, while we get occasional purchases and donations from really cool, kind folks, it’s otherwise entirely run & funded by our founder & editor, Dusti. So if something takes a little longer than you expect, or needs to be fixed and doesn’t get addressed immediately, your grace in those matters is appreciated! Our goal is to present your wonderful poems to challenge and beautify the world. Sometimes life, or grad school, or a short paycheck, or an emergency vet bill might put something off a week or two. We’re always grateful for an understanding community in those moments.
delicate emissions poetry zine 