Salamander 2024 Fiction Contest

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

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

Easter in the Oven

poetry
              —after Kiki Dimoula   The goat was bleating so much its voice had grown hoarse. Furious, I opened the oven door: “Knock it…

The Cherries of Kenwood

poetry
  Gaze down these pink tunnels into deeper pink. The walls are blossoms fashioned of smaller blossoms attached to raised arms that nuzzle other arms. It’s like watching a parade…

The Ice Pond

poetry
  Still alive, the pond freezes and melts, can’t decide.   It remembers the stream that fills it underground.    Caught in a circle of hewn stone, it shivers.  …

Soldier’s Wife

poetry
             Village of Chokan, 8th Century A.D.   If he returns after drinking his black wine I-don’t-know-where. . . . His armor, piled against the…

An Egret

poetry
  empty page of a day and I’m fixed as a prisoner in haunted city walls where the bartender keeps book a flock of blue sails huddle together against the…

Miscarriage, 1943 (Limbo)

poetry
  Pale blue arms folded like a bow across her heart, you were born into silence, the umbilical frayed like your loose connection to life. The priest and his water…

Midnight

poetry
  Measuring out two fingers, I pour it into a heavy glass, weight all in the base. The murmur of it shining —I sip down. Late, I’ve looked out many…

Reading Water

poetry
  Easier than writing in air, but not impossible. A woman at the Chinese temple grieved for her lost son. She wrote the story on the landing of a wide…

Mary, Mary

poetry
  And this is where they found him in the snow. At first we thought a hunter’s shot a deer. My husband’s gun. My garden does not grow. A prescient…

The Pages in August

poetry
  The pages in August were pulpy, some as thick as my tongue, some folding over like tendrils, some spinning out of the orbits of their spines, some oozing a…

After the Overdose

poetry
  Horses glittered in the field Like knives A sudden drop In temperature everything Washed in ash The Yes unstuck Landscapes Picked clean Let’s go down To some train station…