Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

SUBMIT: May 1 through June 1, 2025 | READING FEE: $20

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After Without You I’m Nothing

Julie Danho
| poetry

 

sculpture by Yueting (Ada) Wu, RISD Museum

You would’ve gone right in, but I’m waiting to see
what others do. Against the gallery’s hospital white,

this structure is a fever, eight red-pink panels in a circle,
with a space meant (maybe) as a doorway. Each side,

from across the room, had looked like stained glass,
but up close, my slow orbit makes them ripple:

sheets of acetate stapled to wood frames. Wind, rain,
even sun would force their surrender. As a couple enters,

their silhouettes layer over panels that resemble
cells, tissues, capillaries, the wild quiet of a body

that once you trusted enough to forget its incessant work.
When I go in alone, everything rational tells me

I’m inside someone else’s sorrow, but how can grief
be as gorgeous as this? Two months on, and still today

I woke and had to remember all over again, the morning
greeting me like a cat with bright feathers in its mouth.

Julie Danho’s poetry collection, Those Who Keep Arriving, won the 2018 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. Her chapbook, Six Portraits, received the 2013 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, Pleiades, and Poetry Daily. She has been awarded fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the MacColl Johnson Fund.

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