Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

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

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Leitmotif

Despy Boutris
| poetry

 

Brightness scatters across the sky, pulses
against leaves like a strobe-light. I’m back

to asking for something to believe in: breath
of sky between trees, sun blotting
the hills. Lately, new sorrows sidle up

to old sorrows—at the bar, some man’s hand
on the small of my back. Lately, my body

makes its needs known, all friction burns
& snarling stomach. & today, I make a list
of ways to unalive myself if my cat ever dies.

Inevitable, my mother reminds me, certain
as the wind that blows outside. A relative

of the first girl I liked, winter settles
its weight against my chest, & my breath
catches while grass turns my favorite color.

I’m back to wishing for some kind of animal
to poke its head out from the trees, to sink

its teeth into my palm & say Feel something.
Looking up at the lightning-scribbled sky,
I’m back to begging on my knees.

Despy Boutris is a writer and artist. She is the author of the fiction chapbook Burials (Bull City Press, 2022) and also has work in Ploughshares, Guernica, Agni, Copper Nickel, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in Los Angeles.

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