Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

i sugared your sorrows

poetry
  for ninety-nine cents / pulpy, stringy, filmy, fibrous   the first time we were alone / a texture only you have felt   after the dust speck inside you…

Contact

poetry
  —after Walking Man II and Three Men Walking II by Alberto Giacometti, The Art Institute of Chicago   I.   I’m not alone in this compulsion to touch, to…

Religion

poetry
  You have to squint these days to taste the berry in the blackberries. Still, you eat even the bad ones.   All because the date on the package has…

Memory of an Onion

poetry
  A skillet crackles, a raw crescent And bit of butter becoming, Inevitably, a lone browned, curved Pungent thing, a scalding mouthful   Soon slipping down a throat: consumption Always…

Cucumber Psalm

poetry
  Flourish, unwashed, unpeeled, bouncy boys; grow, citizen-workers, clothed in good dirt— dearest ones, I place my hope in you— your green is king, in my garden. Chopped, you are…

Remote Universal

poetry
  Everything is just like everything else only on a different scale. Galaxies spin like atoms, sure, but also the country has this cloud of negative   electricity around it…

Gospel

poetry
  Rosie, who’s dying of malabsorption, yaps on the front porch. A walking ossuary, she treads the matchboards and waits for the Witnesses—two young women who must smell faintly, I…

Parallax

poetry
  Headlight-brightened bodies pass by, briefly, before blackening again in the nameless expanse of gulch & grass. One could almost say   illusion, that all this seeing is a trick…

The White Album

poetry
  I am listening    by which I mean humming over      by which I mean talking over a bit less than usual       to one of those songs I’m told     have molded…

Ancestry.com

poetry
  What happens when no one who could hold a pen saw your great- aunt as human: records and recordings pinprick your neck’s back— Before they called us stupid coolies,…

Belief

poetry
  You see only an impression in dug earth, long settled into dent on the forested floor: an unmarked grave where a corpse sinks. Moss- covered granite fieldstones in electric…