Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

SUBMIT: May 1 through June 1, 2025 | READING FEE: $20

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poetry
  My kidney snarls at the white wand’s wet nose shoving lovingly into my side, taking   the hipbone-path, sliding west, and I still don’t know why   I’m here…

I Come Back Mid-Fall

poetry
  Whatever it is that holds the chloroform rag to my mouth at midnight and goes out came back   Saturday morning inside my snooze-bar dream as a white fox,…

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

poetry
  There are still the worst minutes of the dream where the dust scatters. Too much light. Too much music. Your body—realized, but unseen—just what an amount of milligrams is…

Ode to my IUD

poetry
  After all that, menstruation, parturition, and one unmentionable visit to one of those clinics in Murray Hill in the nineteen nineties,   you doodle on in and do your…

Killing Mr. Big

poetry
  The old tom sank his claws and tried to leap from the steel counter, but I held his scruff   and nodded to the vet who murmured, For the…

2017 Pushcart Nominations

Announcements
Salamander is so pleased to announce our 2017 nominations for the Pushcart Prize:   Poetry: “Abandoned Nest” by Angela Voras-Hills: Salamander #42 “Some Animal Poems for Children to Learn and…

Kathmandu Reverie

poetry
    I slice the air   on Freak Street   into neat squares   of night smoke:   karma, master, nice legs,   vision breath.     The risen…

Canticle with Nightlight

poetry
  The strangest sleep I slept was not beneath willows                  on twigs and brush              and what…

Fiddler Crabs

poetry
  They look too busy to retire. Or else some government has cut their pensions and they have no option but to remain industrious, whatever it is that they do,…

Molly’s Charm

poetry
  "So much charm, and such a fierce flame," I woke up thinking I'd write on her card after I heard at work that she’d chosen hospice instead of further…

The Ballad of Gavrilo Princip

poetry
  In this nation born of sacrificial smoke, born of vague bullets into an abstract heart…   By the light of candles I read the history books and the consensus…