Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Navigation Without Instruments

poetry
For K.J. Baker   This is abroad where you die any age orienting your map. This is between shell shock and PTSD, the war the greatest generation served in, my…

Bluze

poetry
  Was this one of the girls I knew those twenty years ago? I seek a word in Arabic for blue and find “azraq” and blood is “dam” and bird…

from Cairo Seen Again
Google the Girl

poetry
  Google the girl with the blue bra And you will find her lying, raw Forced over, knocked down on her  back Her legs upraised against attack From fully-clad helmeted…

At the Reading of the Antiwar Poets

poetry
  Someone says, we’re living through an age the ancient Greeks would understand, internecine, unrepairable as red ceramic shards. The famous poet calls the soldiers babykillers, says fuck them. It’s…

Exposition/Expose/Exposure

poetry
  setting forth     an ex- a present     position     point act     of exposing     state of being     exposed   displayed     disclosed wares     details     laid open disposed     of former     opposed for want     of…

We Speak of Forget-Me-Nots

poetry
Tr. from the Portuguese by Calvin Olsen   I see you do not want things to continue This way In this particular case We speak of forget-me-nots A flower about…

Floating Garden

Fiction
  It was a truck like the army uses, but instead of the metal frame and tarp, the back was enclosed in a wooden box. Painted on the plywood was…

In a Foreign City in July

poetry
  The sleeper summer is airing out its torn tendrils, but we think of night sirens, a black sky like a record, the white tooth of Republic Square bare and…

Zagreb, November

poetry
  I find graffiti again and again on different walls, a leitmotif not a landmark: giraffe-people with swirling eyes, initials added together inside hearts, a rabbit as tall as me,…

Sward

poetry
  You come to a clearing like the knoll before the ancient temple in Bar’am a village emptied of its inhabitants still waiting to return. You reach that grassy open…