Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Seamless Bead

poetry
  Smooth and cool with a streak the color of clouds and fog broken   by a coastline, the dove’s egg, because I was pregnant,   seemed to be a…

Nailing the Steps for a Tree Fort

poetry
  Brother, do you remember                the splinters, the shape of that conversation? The words                the bent metal made? How I…

Grown

poetry
  I am two people at dusk, two bodies wrapped in thin cotton Among the crabgrass on some night in August when the narrow Alley light of the full moon…

The Waking Life

poetry
  It is rare for a person to enter a castle, but common for him to die there. Often enough I feed the wrong meter. One bird will raise another’s…

Ways in Which the Daughter Is Imagined

poetry
  Would you believe my red if I exposed the green underneath? Would you carefully cry into my figure and mourn the wet shoulder in your wake? Don’t bother— this…

Prying Oklahoma from a Song

poetry
  Tell me the distance between here and home is not remorse or an old loss rousing out of sleep. Tell me memories are not attached to time. Tell me…

The Persistence of Memory

poetry
  Remember October, the one pressed in your bible & that red whipping wind over the pier. Remember the heavy light   of a bright dying, the compass, a magic…

September Song

poetry
  To conjure love from bitterness, To plant the mint and watch it thrive, From anger capture anger’s fright, Whisk pity into empathy, To walk the dogs in fields at…

Household God

poetry
  Down in the cellar there's a household god. He is drinking up the planet. He has little eyes in his belly, Which are his thoughts, Evidence that he may…

As Daylight Once Was

poetry
  Last night a storm gleaned the last leaves from trees in our courtyard, made a chartreuse cemetery on mulch, exposing ribs of houses once hidden behind profuse canopies. Like…

un/folding

poetry
  In the U-Haul leaving Chicago, we traverse the tall scaffold of the Indiana Skyway. I reach out the window for something concrete, pull back my hand to find candle…