Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Nothing More Now

poetry
  There’s nothing more now but vacant bodies, the equations of being buried. I turn around: everyone is up to their shoulders in sand, they strain to turn their heads,…

Goodbye Blackbird

poetry
  I had this ridiculous pang of nostalgia for Italian bureaucracy so I got a cheap flight to Genoa and then a taxi to the Municipal Hall in Corso Torino…

How to Partner a Runner

poetry
  You will never know what he thinks about while he runs, as music muffles the city’s roar of evening, yawn of morning. As he smells burnt leaves in autumn,…

from The Pink Series

poetry
  Pink Blossom Born in full bloom I grew along the feminine arc— pink diminishment & pink despair pinched back & pedestaled thin into air but even the invisible could…

Broken Fridge

poetry
  For three weeks the fridge has been whining like a dog. It must be the freezer fan, or the compressor: either way, it’s screwed. I have three months left…

from Crown Decline

poetry
    5. The door of the big red shed hides nothing, And this isn’t because the shed is empty. In the season of fertility dugites hibernating, The door of…

Day Cycle

poetry
  Morning—it’s burning in my thighs already, and I climb a steep green crest then let my burden carry me on down its slope, this summer when I’ll have no…

Anniversary

poetry
  The outcomes of our love lie in their bed, sleep-tangled and yeast-warm from the guitar. The stars overwhelm their dome, the mangroves drip their branches down into roots and…

Six

poetry
  In the dream You don’t share Your number Or have you And have I Forgotten Who you are So I trouble Every door And some open Upon couples caught…

Birth Mother’s Second Baby

poetry
  Two-and-a-half years later, she buried my premature sister. Poor mother lives in two worlds of letting go and letting go, of one she can find and another she can’t.

Mercenary

poetry
  Propped on an assault shotgun gun my liquor gun my grass-fed cold-smoked ribeye   I drink single-batch bourbon how sudden is my skull tell me   (after Archilochus)

Breughel’s Procession to Calvary

poetry
  And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him. —Luke 23:33   Diffuse light, no real season. Soldiers everywhere, an occupying army.…