Happy Thursday, readers, writers, and shark fans!
I hope you are all having an absolutely FIN-TASTIC week! Issue 10 of Lit Shark Magazine: The Winter Edition went live yesterday, and the paperback edition is ALREADY available on Amazon for those of you who are interested in purchasing. (You can order it here!) So many great things are happening!
But I want to keep the fun going and share another piece of wonderful news: Lit Shark’s next Poem of the Month!
Submissions for our Poem of the Month contest have been a little lighter this year, sprinkled in throughout the submissions received for Issues 10 through 13, but they’ve been lovely, and while they couldn’t all win, many of them will be able to call one of our upcoming issues home.
For those of you who would like to submit to one of Lit Shark’s Poem of the Month contests, you still can! Submissions are considered on a rolling basis, and it’s always free to enter. Submit here up to five poems or ten pages of poetry. If you want to be considered for our current contest (July), please submit by Tuesday, June 30th! Submissions will still be accepted after that date, but they’ll be considered for the August Poem of the Month Contest instead.
And if you’d like to accomplish two things at once: if you have poems that you believe would be a good fit for our SHARK DOG Edition, please submit by Monday, June 1st. For a quick response, put “POTM SHARK DOG” in the subject line. These poems will be considered for our Poem of the Month contest and for Issue 11 of Lit Shark Magazine: The SHARK DOG Edition, for which we still seriously need submissions. The issue started in response to the XL Bully Ban in the UK and Wales (you can read our earlier comments on it here and here), and the issue is for misunderstood and marginalized breeds of dogs and other species of animal, stigmatized animals like sharks and hyenas, and also human experiences that relate to feeling excluded, misunderstood, and marginalized. We’ve all had our moments of feeling misunderstood, left out, and stuck in the shadows, and we’ve surely seen animals go through it, too; it’s time we write about it.
Now… on to today’s main event! Yay!
May’s Honorable Mention!
As I said earlier, many lovely pieces were submitted for the Poem of the Month contest, but I was especially drawn to one.
Bob McAfee – “January Morning on the Swamp Trail”
This tightly-written and heavily-enjambed poem immerses the reader into the marshes, surrounded by early morning mist, a cacophony of marsh birds, and the constant possibility of crocodiles. While the reader has the page between them and the crocs (or they could even turn the page entirely!), the persona only has their bike to use “as a shield / between us / walking slow / in the January mist.” It’s suspenseful, breathtaking, and I just loved it.
Bob’s poem will appear in Issue 12 of Lit Shark Magazine: The SHARK WEEK Edition, and it will appear again in Lit Shark’s Best Of 2025-2026 Anthology, coming out in November 2026. I can’t wait for you all to read it!
And May’s Winner Is…
Amidst all of the wonderful submissions we received, including our Honorable Mention, I am so pleased to announce that the winner of Lit Shark Magazine’s May Poem of the Month contest is KB Ballentine.
I cannot say what it is about the sea or the wider oceans, but they seem uniquely welcoming of our navigations of grief, our need to be cleansed of it. I’ve read some of the most beautiful poetry about loss and grief and life “after” (though there isn’t really an “after grief,” is there?) since launching Lit Shark Magazine, and KB’s poem is no exception. In KB’s poem, there’s a lingering sense of anticipatory grief and loss, tangled with the various remnants one might find on the beach (driftwood, shells, trash), and that echoes for me with how messy grief actually is, how it’s sprinkled across our lives, our beaches never perfectly smooth. I just love this poem, its imagery, its slow and intentional movement, and how the white space echoes the movement of the waves. I’m so grateful it found its home with Lit Shark.
Like Bob’s poem, KB’s poem will appear in Issue 12 of Lit Shark Magazine: The SHARK WEEK Edition, and it will appear again in Lit Shark’s Best Of 2025-2026 Anthology, coming out in November 2026.
About KB Ballentine:
KB Ballentine’s latest collection, All the Way Through, was published in November 2024 from Sheila-Na-Gig Inc. Current books can be found with Blue Light Press, Iris Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others, her work also appears in anthologies, including Women Speak (2025) and The Strategic Poet (2021).
You can find out more at her website: (www.kbballentine.com)
“Scale a Swelling Sea” by KB Ballentine
SCALE A SWELLING SEA
I remember the tide rushing in,
wavelets foaming between my toes —
sunset, noon, sunrise. Seaweed tangled
on the shore looked like mermaids’ toys.
Lost rudders and buoys, abandoned fish crates
gripped by wet and heavy sand swirled by surf,
etched with bird prints, paw prints,
footprints fading — including my own.
I’m on the North Sea this morning,
salt-spray rioting off the rocks, the shore.
Home phantoms my thoughts, and I miss
the days when I could grasp my father’s hand.
I remember how strong, how sure his hold —
now more like the foam, the spray: dissolving,
vanishing.
[PLEASE NOTE that KB’s poem is not accurately formatted here on the website, though I tried. 💙 The poem is represented properly in the broadside below and will also be accurately presented in Issue 12 and the Best Of 2025-2026 Anthology. My apologies to all of you, especially to KB, for the weird formatting!]
“Scale a Swelling Sea” Broadside Created by McKenzie Lynn Tozan
For each contest, the winner will receive a unique digital broadside of their winning poem, and the one I created can be found below. When I read this poem, I was stuck on the persona’s walk by the North Sea, and I thought of bare feet walking through small bits of driftwood, shells, and rocks that may have been washed in, the sound of the waves, and the lingering sense of what was already gone and what was to come. I loved, too, the “seaweed tangled / on the shore,” which I incorporated as something reaching out, trying to touch, trying to remind… And something about the “fish crates / gripped by wet and heavy sand swirled by the surf” was beautiful but made the world feel a little bit gray. These are just a few of the things I was thinking about while exploring a possible world for this poem, and I’m so grateful to have the chance to create this. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing it as much as I enjoyed making it.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s Poem of the Month winner and broadside! If you’d like to see our past winners, you can see them collected here.
We also have them available to purchase, as well as commissions for broadsides outside of the Poem of the Month contest, on our Lit Shark Shop!
On the Lookout For the Next Winner!
If you’d like to be considered for our July Poem of the Month, please submit your poems for consideration as soon as possible! The absolute deadline is Tuesday, June 30th, 2026, but again, if you’d like to be considered for the Poem of the Month AND The SHARK DOG Edition, please send by Monday, June 1st.
One winner will be selected, and they will receive $20, a unique digital broadside of their winning poem, mentions on our social media and our website, a feature in our next issue of Lit Shark Magazine, and automatic inclusion in our annual Best Of Anthology.
Honorable Mentions will also be considered. They will receive a mention on our social media and website, and they will be featured in the next issue of Lit Shark Magazine, also including automatic inclusion in our annual Best Of Anthology.
Submitting to the Poem of the Month contest also counts as a general submission, so even if your work isn’t selected as a winner or honorable mention, your work may still be picked up for an upcoming issue! With it being free to enter, what do you have to lose?
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