Last Tuesdays with Sandy & Thomas

Last Tuesday of the month via Zoom for OPN subscribers only / 5:45pm PST sign-up for open mic, which starts at 6:00pm. Featured Reader program runs from 6:45-7:30pm 

Words are muscle. I’m constantly astonished by what a well-turned stanza can accomplish.
PATRICIA SMITH

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Last Tuesdays with Sandy & Thomas

On the last Tuesday of every month, OPN Board members Sandy Yannone and Thomas A. Thomas, will host an Open Mic and a featured reader, followed by a conversation with our invited guest over a specific poem. This program is for our OPN subscribers only. 

Sign-ups for the Open Mic start at 5:45pm Pacific. Each reader has a maximum of 3 minutes. To respect everyone, we strongly recommend that you practice and time your reading. The Open Mic readings begin at 6:00pm PST for a half hour, followed by a break and our featured poet, with the program ending at 7:30.

 The Zoom link will be sent by email to OPN subscribers only.

October. 2025's Featured Poet
Carolyne Wright
Look for the ZOOM link in your mailbox from OPN (subscribers only)​

This month our featured reader is Carolyne Wright. Her latest books are Masquerade: a Memoir in Poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry. A Seattle native and Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, she teaches for Richard Hugo House. Carolyne has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and the Fulbright Association, including a 2022-2024 Fulbright to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.  Forthcoming is Trajectories: Crossing the Map of Poetry, a volume of essays and interviews, in the University of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry Series.

Carolyne's poem for Tuesday, October 28th is:

​Powdered Room
 
 
The afternoon I powdered my Grandma's room
I wasn't trying to be mean. That flask of bath talcum
was probably meant for my or my little brother's bottom
when we were small and whimpering with diaper rash.
But I was a big girl now, I had just turned five,
not this many anymore—too many fingers
to hold up to the grownups. I had to show them 
my whole hand, which fit so smoothly around that flask 
of Johnson & Johnson on Grandma's dressing table 
when I tiptoed through her basement bedroom's open door.  
 
I'd watched her softly powder her doughy arms, 
pat talcum onto her pillowy bosom as it descended 
into cleavage of her flowered rayon old-lady 
dresses from the War. Blonde sunlight streamed 
through my Grandma's bedroom windows, glowing 
across the chenille bedspread, the glass-topped 
vanity table and chest of drawers, the nightstand 
and steamer trunk from her own parents'
voyage in steerage from the Old Country.  
 
I let myself go cheerfully creative for an hour,
humming some kiddy ditty from a cartoon show
and shaking talcum snow over the hand-stitched 
pillowcases, the bureau tops, the big easy chair
(a cast-off of my Dad's) with its crocheted 
afghan throw—even the shepherd and shepherdess
figurines with their separate family group
of ceramic sheep, and the Swiss music box,
its vellum top painted with a boy in lederhosen
blowing on a child-sized alpenhorn
in the shadow of the Eiger.  
 
How better
to celebrate the colors and shapes and textures
of my Grandma's room, the snowy angels of art
descended into my big girl's shaking hand?
Dinner time and I skipped upstairs to the kitchen,
so richly satisfied that I can't recall what 
happened next—did I announce my handiwork
before astonished grownups at the table?
 
Or did Grandma's cry of consternation--Gott
im Himmel!—rise from the basement through the aroma
of my Mother's after-dinner coffee?
Did my Daddy paddle my bottom with his hand
or wallop me with the belt he always threatened
before my parents sent me back to Grandma's room
to clean up everything?
 
                                                I doubt 
I cleaned up everything. Even with artful angels
in her big girl's hands, how could that five-
year old have pulled a queen-sized bedspread 
off Grandma's high antique bed, shaken it out
in the yard, hauled it to the laundry area
in the far corner of the cellar, bundled it
into the top-loading washer, set the stiff controls,
slammed the washer door, then dragged the clean 
wet bedcover to the laundry line outside
to hang with Grandma's wooden clothespins?
Then repeated the process with afghans, pillowcases
and throw rugs? Or wiped and polished the antique 
sheep without their slipping from my fingers
to shatter on the concrete floor?
 
                                                I don't recall,
and only one image remains: my chubby hand 
pushing a damp rag vaguely across the glass top 
of Grandma's vanity, smearing a moist swathe 
through the gray-white snow-dust of Johnson's. 
My bottom stung, I sniffled and whimpered as I wiped,
but a secret grin was gleaming through my tears.
 
 
 
for my maternal grandmother, Mary Klenk Lee
 

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September 2025's Featured Reader

September 30, 2025
Caitlyn Dwyer 
Look for the ZOOM link in your mailbox from OPN (subscribers only) ​

This month our featured poet is Caitlin Dwyer, the 2025 Sally Albiso Award winner,
reading from her soon-to-be published In the Salt, by MoonPath Press.
Her poetry has appeared in journals such as swamp pink, Pangyrus, Thrush, Beloit
Poetry Journal, and Notre Dame Review. Her essays have appeared in Longreads,
Narratively, and Creative Nonfiction and been honored with awards and fellowships.
She has studied writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop and the University of Hong
Kong, and she teaches at Portland Community College. When not writing, she is either in
the woods or playing ’the floor is lava’ with her kids. 
​
For more on the web, here’s her website link:  www.caitlindwyer.com

Caitlin’s poem for Tuesdays, September 30 th 2025 is:

Changeling
We left behind our borrowed scrubs
and thank-you notes for the surgeons
and something else, something I
should know but can’t remember,
some intimacy, some former idea
of the body as — no, it was not
the body, ever, but a different kind
of haven. We left it behind. Or it
never existed. Look, there’s no point
in not asking: Did we escape,
or didn’t we? I think about this
constantly. In the kitchen I push
on a loaf and it yields and yields
and the yeast are exhaling their
death-breaths into the flour.
I don’t know how to make bread.
I don’t know who lived and who

made it home. Instead,
I cook him plums. He’s just started
to eat soft fruit. They told me to
strip the purple skin, flappy
on the flesh, but when I do
it recalls the viscera of sunrise,
yellow pink pulp deliquescing
over the rooftops, the helicopter pad,
the peace garden, that useless
pile of weeds. One botanical use
of deliquesce is to form many small
branches. In which universe
are we living now? The one
where he lived, the one
where he died, the one
where I die, the one
where we all live
and eat plums together.
Whose child am I feeding?
Whose hands are disemboweling
plums? He flips the spoon
and dumps it, grins at me.
His lungs like dead moth’s wings.
Heart clenching its beats
like a clam clutching
seawater. Leaky
fist. He laughs
as I cut away the soft parts,
the bruises, the narrow
tear-shaped seeds. He opens
his mouth like a boy, this creature
who came home with us.

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Past Readers for LTWS&T

February 27, 2024 Lana Hechtman Ayers, editor of MoonPath Press
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Jan. 30, 2024: Kim Ports Parsons