Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

I See Signs of Autumn

poetry
  voices clashing lines to an election drafted on the canvas. Mornings here afar covering American night news are cold as Aschbach Walzweiher long, wavering lake’s strands of mist hiding…

A Stilt of Daddy Longlegs

poetry
  Call it that, this hatch or migration around the campfire pit, so that they ascend our own long legs, and we catch a glimpse of them or their shadows…

On Hatred

poetry
  Forty minutes south of here the foliage changes, and forty minutes more there are armadillos, which are adorable and carry leprosy. At the rest area the thick nylon divider…

Dear Jeff Bezos,

poetry
  Rich guys liking space is such a huge cliché that I won’t ask about Blue Origins or your Picard costume. I’d rather talk about the Clock of the Long…

Moving to a Tourist Town

poetry
  Grove Park Inn Summer afternoon, the Great Hall’s cool dark felt like entering a cave. Refreshing but ghostly— an all-knowing chill from those thick granite walls, four-and-a-half feet deep,…

Biologies

poetry
  A professor and a doctor walk onto a farm to measure the mechanical pressure and heat surrounding the inflated carcass of a cloud decomposing on the ground by a…

Peaches

poetry
  We were on the grass in the back of the palace snacking on rare songbirds when Jerónimo sprouted peaches out of his fingernails. The peaches made him look large…

Kinesthesia

poetry
  As if to say a body discovers what the mind can never comprehend, my son Jonas is always asking, “Who invented numbers?” “What do you mean?” What does he…

Steer Skull on the Minnesota

poetry
  South Dakota border. Brown mule stirs up dust, leopard frogs disrupt blue stem. Cicadas, their long songs, comfort, hush and darken the wind-broken groves. We walk the deer path…