Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Where Will The Barn Swallows Go?

poetry
  They don’t build their nest under the roof tiles anymore. They fly circles around the shed, they come and go with mud on their beaks but they don’t settle,…

Who Are You, Brother?

poetry
  Who are you, brother, with your gun at my temple, in your suicide vest, are you the reformer who received dream instructions from God to extinguish a handmaiden of…

Odin and the Runes

poetry
  After nine days of hanging, seeing just branches and leaves, the god forgot himself and focused on the tree, went into it as one in water loses themselves, stroke…

The Red Cape

Fiction
  Orlando’s mother, Grace, once said she’d make a terrible liar. I know why she said this. Her face showed her every emotion. I have never had that problem myself.…

Beaver Moon

poetry
  Yes, it feels like winter, but it isn’t winter. Ice lines the banks, but the river still needs damming, still needs something beside the air to slow it down.…

From the Treadmill

poetry
  TV1 has a blonde actress who must be eighteen years old or is pretending in a music video to play that crestfallen age, that rhetorical-middle-finger-to-the-rhetorical-Man age, but   the…

Frack

poetry
    Cheaper to keep her than to delete her   who saves a marriage of true minds   under the sun streaming data unsupervised   by the Monopolated Light…

Hail Columbia

poetry
  My daughters will give me Hail Columbia, that’s what I told the nurse, says the old lady to her son, as she holds up her slightly trembling right hand,…

That Day

poetry
  One day we decided the boy and girl children in each doll family had been so bad they must be punished publicly, and at length. We led them to…

The Wounded Table / La Mesa Herida

poetry
-after Frida Kahlo   Have you seen my painting?   2 x 8 meters, disappeared, passed through the walls in Warsaw. I suspect it has been exiled to a Soviet…

Endless Dictations

poetry
  pour down like rain on the roof tiles of a house on the outskirts of the city we once lived in before the war dispersed our possessions to the…

Till You Walk In Her Shoes

poetry
  I’m walking in your shoes, the black boots trimmed in fur, found in your closet, price tag dangling, the evening of the day we buried you.   I was…