Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

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…

The Life of Body and Soul

poetry
  Or, on rare inspired days, the life of soul and then body. And sometimes, both suffer together, like a man with a bad foot limping through the airport, late…

And a Car Turns Down a Street

poetry
  And a car turns down a street for the final time, its service puttering to an end. A man sits on his bed, puts on his shoes for—what will…

Dispersal

poetry
  The partial veil of the mushroom tears,   reveals its   stem joined with the gilled cap’s frail underside.   Flecked with primordia,   the damp soil is woven…

My Late Life

poetry
  My late life, father of my delights, you vanished without explanation or was it my fate of which I had been patron and author until parsimonious death cut the…

London Morning

poetry
  Your morning soon Your morning song London morning Is dawning New York night Has fallen And when you are waking I’ll be dreaming Of a woman waking In a…