Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

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When Earth Downloads Tinder

poetry
  I throw off my ozone like a thong after a long day. Clouds part like pursed lips deflating in defeat as I spread-eagle on my pastoral couch, straddle the…

Tete a tete

poetry
  the most popular of miniature daffodils   I’ve waited— seen others brighten   neighbor’s yards—south-facing beds,   low elevation—who knows what makes some hardier   early on. There’s nothing…

House

poetry
  after “Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente   I was a house once      very large       empty rooms aching like teeth I knew what a house knows  …

Yucca Valley

poetry
  Light dissolves on the outskirts of town where the trees are mostly their arms, devoid of reason in a strange dream. What hides in itself in the desert? I…

Somedays

poetry
  There is a clay house strange in a desert but no windows, no doors, people are gone no sound except bullets cracking past my ear, and then I wake…

whose evacuation

poetry
  the neighbors build on the brink of forest, in a few months, the house could be done or gone. watch from the field as they pour foundation concrete, then…

Alluvium

poetry
  Having settled I had to be down with the man who taught me   to understand the geologic scale of things. The man   who made me— see that?…

Inheritance

poetry
  dilapidation on the lawn we watch without sorrow; a chair, perhaps is the irretrievable earth   appraising, I think, this came from my father’s country where bricks are the…