Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Every Poet Needs a Brother

poetry
  He will be a beggar–– no, a barber!   And he will polish your nails each time you lay down your pen   even though hair is his only…

The Nineties

poetry
  I love these new super bookstores! Right here on upper Broadway— a standing invitation to a private stately home stocked with milling lounging browsing guests sipping demitasse or eating,…

Halloween Vespers with Homemade Vader

poetry
  Bless the amber porch light that coronets his flimsy helmet’s sheen and the ringlets this dusk breeze bounces on elastic straps thin as earthworms baked black atop the stoop.…

Long White Hallway

poetry
  I wait for you there, pushing the baby in his stroller. The baby claps with concentration and delight. A tiny, black-haired woman’s cheek bleeds as I walk from Emergency…

How Your Leaving Left Me

poetry
  Feeling like the neighborhood cat who fell through the screen of my open skylight, curiosity in this case leading, not to death, but limbo—stuck in an empty house until…

Wife’s Song

poetry
  starts skygreen as a glow in the chest cracks like a tree branch, her lips a deluge of lost notes, plastic fossils a lone mop tumbling down the street…

Y, Y

poetry
  Yeah, you are obsessed: with your yellowish skin, you are forever lost in your meditation within the shape of a wishbone, inside the broken wing of an oriental bird…

But I Am Not Here

poetry
  But I am not here to fall asleep, to keep sleeping—I open the window, take issue with the black slag, the burning, blazing city I rummage through to find…

Kansas Promise

poetry
  I knew a bullnecked man in Kansas, born of woman, plowman, fellow man, he turned into a swan. The dust and yellow corn of Kansas in the sun, the…

Why I Was Medieval as a Child

poetry
  “Window” was vind-auga, if I remember old Norse right—the “wind-eye” for smoke to spiral out and light to finger in at some hollowed cranny high by thatch, open slot…