Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Poem at the Edge of a Circle

poetry
  My house is not a house of small beautiful things and nothing is ever clean here. A pucker in the doorframe indicates the upper floor will soon fall to…

I Decided I Would Fail at Everything

poetry
  Let my spider plant shrivel in a swim of photons. I found the perfect word and backspaced it out of memory. I slept until everyone slept, then woke to…

I Renounce My Life as a Philodendron

poetry
  Even as telephones buzz and silver voices sing of cash flow strategies, I slump in a shadowed corner by the photocopier and do not make a sound, not a…

Humans Naming Trees

poetry
  willow, sallow, blackthorn thought is made in the mouth   quaking aspen, silver birch pulse is mouth in the wrist   cedar, alder, slippery elm wrist is grief in…

Obituary

poetry
  I welcome emptiness. It is a good start. An empty vessel holds no dynamite. An empty   mind plans no atrocities. Hold my hand and share how it feels,…

Breath’s Opinion

poetry
  in memory of Sam Seskin   All I know is: at this moment, a young scholar solves   a century-old problem. A group of six climbs Everest, a group…

Optimism

poetry
  Butterfly feast, hillside on fire. So many   bright things dulled   in the wind. This is how we pass, unnoticed.

look, my monologue has broken off

poetry
  look, my monologue has broken off I don’t know who’s guilty maybe my own brain allured towards another light by the little beggars who tug on your sleeves  …

she told me to color my hair

poetry
  she told me to color my hair and cut it I want to stay wild as in my childhood when the trees were god’s lungs and the stars the…

Ghost Umbilicus

poetry
  To touch the indentation, purled and pinched, centered in a swale of flesh between bone ridges, point   where tissue was severed, and we were torn from the beat…

Six Degrees of Separation from Kuniyoshi,

poetry
  a man who covered his body in tattoos, tattoo, its root in seventeenth century Dutch for “turn off the taps,” prolonged bugle call to tavern owners so soldiers would…