Dear Readers, After much deliberation, I have decided that the January 2020 issue of Syntax & Salt Magazine will be its last. I am so very grateful to everyone who has been a part of this labor of love: our first line readers, our editors and special editors, our Patreon supporters, social media followers, and … Continue reading A Farewell to Syntax & Salt Magazine: January 2020
Here, I sleep for three days. My eyes catch the light that fills the room from the thin curtains. he room without a rug. If I wake up, I play with the strands of hair on the pillow. I get up when I’m cold, and make towers with the books she stuffed on the sofa. … Continue reading Pilgrimage of The Haggard by Nazli Karabiyikoglu
Two nights ago, I heard a radio station play your alien song wrapped in static and enigma. It was of course a dream; no one’s heard a radio in many years. I imagined the haunting melody as I lay beside the river bridge in the valley where I left my father’s body many years ago. … Continue reading When You Sang Back to Us by Chloie Piveral
You all know how life usually begins. First, there is silence. Second, a crescendo. Muffled gurgling, the sounds of something clawing its way out of a steamy, liquid-filled sac. Third, a blast of noise, a symphony of dissonances. Light, all around. Breathe—! Not for this child. First, there was silence. Second, there was silence. And … Continue reading We Were Here by Matthew Bailey
Last night, I dreamt of the spacemen in Fiddler’s Green. I heard them floating outside my house—their suits creaking like branches in the wind, visors tapping against my windowpane—lost forever in the darkness of space. I imagine their bodies, frozen in near zero, or else planted on some distant planet, destined to form part of … Continue reading An Elegy for May in the Forest of the Noble Spacemen by Dafydd McKimm
Ruben never knows who he raises from the dead when he plays the first song, and he still doesn’t know when they leave during the second. Raw bones, flayed with rotting skin, half-recognisable faces: an old man who settles in an old sofa with a rattling sigh; the pale girl leaning back against the crumbling … Continue reading When Bones Sing by K. A. Tutin
Long after the last year of corn and well beyond when farmers abandoned the shattered husks littering grey-soiled acres, the three Baba Yagas planted a child seed in the still-rich dirt of their own secret field. The Baba Yagas had watched as men and women fled north and north, running from the world’s expanding belt … Continue reading The Child Seed by Joshua Phillip Johnson
It moves across your skin as though alive. The pelts, stitched neatly together as a single taut piece of elaborate fabric, squeezing, constricting, tighter, breathing vibrant gentle and alive. You flex under it, feel it flex back. One hundred percent organic and costs it. Admire how it clings to every curve. You move to ease … Continue reading Fashion by Genelle Chaconas
The storm brought the sea into the village. Waves rolled between the huts and rattled doors, gurgling, sucking, and slapping like some clumsy creature that wanted to come inside. Gilli could not stay huddled with her family. It sounded so alive she had to look. She crept to the door and opened it a crack, … Continue reading Sea Change by Robin Husen
Just after eleven on a velvet June night, the moon rolls like a pearl dropped from the sky. You and I hurry along Sycamore Street as it kisses down into the dark cornfields, the same place it chooses every month. Then we run, giggling. When you grab my hand, my heart skips a double-dutch rhythm. … Continue reading Lights That Shine by Aimee Ogden