Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Tenebrae

poetry
  Our Savior’s spine shines incandescent. We walk on each other’s bare heels, follow one another by our sense of light.   We walk through pine and stubble. We walk…

The Great Nebula of Orion

poetry
  Impossible to read, held with another bit of wax, like chewing gum A small white calling card full of emptiness         A girl dances in a…

Map of a Woman’s Heart

poetry
          Joseph Husson 1840, ink & watercolor   At the center is the Ocean of Love Though it’s not a circle – one ragged Peninsula to…

Ohio hills

poetry
  it began on Timbre Ridge Lake after a concussion of rain it began as apparitions in wisps and runnels don't whimper at the old mine's whistling don't run away…

Biopsy

poetry
  Here on the cold examination table, I miss the cradle of my bra. Soon the radiologist will sink a bright needle into my breast.   In the low afternoon…

Fronts

poetry
  I once had a teacher who loved to cross out the first few pages of our stories – even when our stories were only a few pages long. He…

Sides

poetry
  We knew they couldn’t really arrest you for picnicking on the side of the road, but we kept reframing our position anyway. There were no signs, we protested, this…

Compounds

poetry
  Under different circumstances, we might have enjoyed having our meals cooked for us, our activities coordinated, but we’d been evacuated from our sites and were worried that we were…

Spring Drought

poetry
  spring days feel a little salty dry sun, a cold and hard ball of white wind lifts our house up to mid-air, a tree of peach blossom slanting by…

Portrait of Pessoa as Shepherd-Poet

poetry
  The shepherd-poet measures himself against the void, cuts from the canvas of nothingness a poet shaped outline which he massages into a coat, his fingers working against its pliant…

Vision

poetry
  The morning drive east on Trapelo Road. Cars become islands in a fog of light. The white is seamless, a piece of unsewn cloth   laughing in the air.…

Atthis

poetry
  Do not follow me anymore, Atthis, like Sappho I also adored you, but do not sleep in me like a nightmare now. Mirrored in a boy’s soft eyes I…