Caitlin Dwyer
Caitlin Dwyer writes, parents, and teaches in Portland, Oregon. She studied English at Pomona College, where she edited the literary magazine, backpacked the Sierra Nevada mountains, and signed up for far too many clubs.
After three years teaching and writing in China, Caitlin got her Master of Journalism degree from University of Hong Kong; her essays have since appeared in publications such as Narratively, Longreads, and Creative Nonfiction. She also creates podcasts and audio journalism.
Caitlin received her MFA in poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop through Pacific Lutheran University. She teaches writing at Portland Community College, where she works primarily with first-year, firstgeneration college students. In her free time, she is either reading, wandering in the woods, or playing “the floor is lava” with her children.
2025 Sally Albiso Award Winner
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Poem from In the Salt
Nausicaä Visits the Tarot Reader
Name three men you’ll love. Name six. Name ten. All of them have the same initials, which you carved into a log at fifteen and burned. Was it the counting that mattered, the listing and circling of options, the implication of ruin? You’ll live in a palace with a prince. You’ll live in a beach-shack with a sailor’s son. You’ll live. This card is development, potential, possibility. Under each symbol a thousand grains of sand rubbing against each other, their shell-grind and smoothing. It makes a looking glass of sorts, the way hard-packed sand seeps water and holds the scattering of the sky. See how reversed, he is nearly erased, a dark reflection in a dry pool. She leans away, luminous. You love and you circle a name. You love so you cross out a name, cancel its syllables in your mind. You love. Remove the object. Remove the veil. One day you will throw away the skin on which you inked his names. I hate to tell you there’s more to life, so instead, a fortune: You will live by an ocean in the ribs of a whale. You will marry the moon and you will have six children, two dogs, and a harp, and you will drive a chariot made of baleen and dulse. Don’t believe me? Girl-child, watch. See already how the list of letters burns.
