Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

SUBMIT: May 1 through June 2, 2024 | READING FEE: $15

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Plenty

poetry
++August, the last of the apricots haunts the trees. Their furred skins, split, rotten and dangerous, crawling with stingers on the unseen side of the globes. ++Above me, buzzards tilt…

In Defense of Voice-over

poetry
+++after Charlie Kaufman Do I have an original thought in my head Does anyone What about an epiphyte Does it bloom with the same knowledge that’s stored in a tree’s…

One More Chorus

poetry
  Anything’s lucky or unlucky just because someone said so once and we all agreed so I say Friday the 13th is a lucky day since it reminds me of…

White Irises

poetry
  Larkin said: “I know this is paradise,” picturing those fuck-drunk teens who brushed past him on the cobbled street: the boy’s hand on her hip, beer on his breath;…

Invoke: an inflorescent incantation

poetry
  Meditate: though you balk at stalk, my tassels tantalize, manchild majazzling, intricate florals radiate out from the central sunflower, butterflies dally, dance, bees prance, bumble, dizzy, bop-pop out like…

Illumination

poetry
  If you hold the syringe sideways, is it more gangster? You push the plunger through the barrel. The hilt of the blade hubs the needle, holds the shaft’s darkness…

Little Song

poetry
  I feel like I am forgetting something every time I travel. Outside baggage, four excavators paw at the wreckage of the old terminal like the horses whose barn burns…

Memory of Water

poetry
  From his schoolbook, the boy tore out a map of seas. The teacher with her sunny face and scraped-back hair wasn’t looking. The blues were beautiful. He’d never seen…

All Our Lives

poetry
  the stew sauce sizzles little hope & joy accumulates we are made of what we forgive i go out for care, gaze & liquor i am the sky &…

We Drink to the Unsayable

poetry
  To a world spun around one question. To the geometries of the radio bird on brown brambles in winter— to our kitchen doors & dens of disorder. To the…

You Had a Sibling, Briefly

poetry
Your mother wanted to give you an origin story of which to be proud, not the embarrassment of finding out she was pregnant while working the land records of the…

Rites of Passage

poetry
A thunderclap, and the sparrows erupt from the clouds like a shock of rain. I awake to such closeness. My youth, the bird struggling in my chest with all its…