Olympia Poetry Network October 2026 Reading

OPN’s October 2026 Reading & Open Mic
Michele Bombardier, OPN’s Monthly Reading Feature

Wednesday, October 21, 6:00-7:30 p.m.
Traditions, The Gathering Place
5th & Water Street, Olympia
Open Mic Sign-up opens at 5:30 p.m.

Michele Bombardier is the author of Don’t Ask Me How I Know, runner-up for the Albiso Award and finalist for the Washington Prize, and What We Do, finalist for the Washington Book Award. She is the 2024 winner of the NORward Prize and the founder of Fishplate Poetry, offering workshops and retreats to raise money for humanitarian aid. She worked as a speech-language pathologist in hospitals and private practice before returning to graduate school for her MFA in poetry. Recent work has appeared in JAMA, New Ohio Review, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. Her poetry has been read on NPR and set to music and performed at OPERA America in NYC. She served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Bainbridge Island.

Open Mic sign-up begins at 5:30
Open Mic begins at 6:00.
The featured reader is scheduled to begin at 6:50.

Trying to Pray

Once, I dreamt of a friend, heard the bell
of her laugh, and in the morning, learned
she’d died. How can she be gone
when she appears in the fog-lit woods
where I walk? Don’t tell me about the brain,
its grid system. How am I alive,
this constellation of cells and muscle
over bones that propel me day into night.
And within this machine, inside the fisted engine
in my chest and its deeper bellows,
I feel something ethery, iridescent, yet invisible.
I pray to this shaky glimmer.
Because my dead keep knocking.
Because I so much want to open the door.