Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

The Sea Is Also a Horse

poetry
  In Cambridge, I bought a Passport to the Moon, with a large map from 1679 drawn by Giandomenico Cassini, & issued by the Lunar Ministry of Solar System &…

Mobius

poetry
  The calcified doors open like shells as I open my eyes and remember you The shells of my lungs open with speech in the palindrome of memory   The…

Realizing

poetry
  “Silver seems to dominate in the Carolinian dream, when it is, of all such dreams, the one least likely to be realized.” —Popular Science, 1892   Silver does dominate…

Mine

poetry
  Prospectors may appraise an entire mountain range and identify only the absence of a single ore.   But if just mica and corundum crumbs are found, if the profits…

Hains Point

poetry
  The old men chide each other to tee up quick, before the rain. I want to buy a fountain soda, sit on the porch, and eavesdrop. I want to…

Portmanteau Prayer for Moms

poetry
  lord, grant us the shelter of strangers where no one needs us to be animute, invisociable as an old retriever   give us room to braid our three halves…

Transatlantic

poetry
  This alone. The man on the TSA line right in front of you, carrying caribou antlers. Yes, you drank. Yet no doubt. There he stands with the horns. And…

Rumorville

poetry
  Mathematicians don’t have friends. Astrophysicists: kinky. Oceanographers: beige, stringy, often unaware of holes in their hearts. Chronologists will not shut up. Chemists: introverted onanists who wear a single suit…

Truth I Tell

poetry
  —after Sara Borjas   There is a footrest inside of me: lie. Everyone steps on it and never wants to leave: that is a lie. I give them water…