The Stillwater Review operates as a magazine committed to poetry, and its reading period is deliberately bounded: submissions are accepted only from September 1 until December 1. This finite window is not incidental but structural, allowing the editorial team to concentrate attention on a single, coherent body of work rather than an unending stream. The journal asks that poets send one to three poems in a single document, and that they submit only once per reading period. There is no fee to submit, a policy that keeps the threshold to entry low and the focus squarely on the writing itself. In terms of editorial inclination, the journal states plainly that it tends to accept more lyric poems of shorter length. This is a meaningful signal. It suggests a preference for compression, for the musical line, for poems that trust the intensity of the brief utterance over the expansive gesture. Poets whose work leans toward the narrative, the discursive, or the long-form may find the journal less receptive, not out of exclusion but out of a defined aesthetic. The lyric mode—whether traditional or fractured, metrical or free—is the center of gravity here. The submission process is straightforward and entirely online. The submission link is active only during the reading period and will appear below the guidelines on the journal's page. There is no physical address, no postal route, no reading fee. What the journal offers is a clear, seasonal invitation: a defined window, a small number of poems, and an editorial eye trained on the short lyric. For poets who work in that register, the call is direct and unadorned.