Spider magazine & poetry questions

First of all, does the Cricket group still buy all rights?

Second, I have a poem I think would be good for Spider. Their guidelines say 20 lines maximum. My poem is 21 lines.  (7 stanzas of 3 lines each.) The guidelines for Cricket say 25 lines maximum, but I think this poem is too young for the upper end of the Cricket age range. If it were you, would you send it to Spider, hoping they were flexible on the maximum, send it to Cricket and assume they could pass it to Spider if it wasn't a good fit for Cricket, or just find a different market? I'm not willing to cut lines at this point, but there sure aren't many markets for a poem this long! If anyone can think of a market that does take them that long, please let me know! Someone suggested maybe I should save it for a book of my own poetry, but I'm not sure if I'm up to writing that many more poems on similar themes.

Alison:  To answer your other question, my understanding is that they usually buy all rights, but not always.

I don't think (??) they are super stringent on the line count give or take a line or two --I've spent all weekend reading 56 copies of the 'bug mags' and there ARE a couple poems (they're like a story poem) that were 22 lines in Spider! And also some very short ones in Cricket. I think the thing I learned most from studing all these were that the man defference between these two mags were the use of sophisticated words used in Cricket poetry (about half of them) If that makes any sense.
So I'd go with the overall theme, vocabulary and tone to make your decision more than the WC.

 :- Christine -

Hmm, Allison, I have sorta the same problem in that I have several poems that I was going to send to Spider and Cricket, but wasn't sure which ones should go where.  Looking on their website, I noticed they both ask subs to be sent to Submission Editor- without any specific mention of which magazine. Are they assuming we will add the appropriate magazine name? I'm thinking I will send them all to that address without mentioning which magazine I mean, and they can sort them out to where-ever.  Well, I'd like to do that. Be the easiest for me!