MY PORTLAND

by Tricia Knoll

Photos by Morley Knoll

Portland people march. That’s what we do when called from our desks, our beds, classrooms, jobs. We know our history. The KKK. Davenport Flood. Japanese internment. Redlining. Gentrification.

We thread the blocks downtown like needles seeking to bind up frayed fabric. From four directions we come for Pride, Black Lives, climate change, our left-coast city. To the county whose votes determine how the state goes.

We mantra our weirdness, embrace the smallest park in the world and the largest city park. We drink micro-brews and unfiltered water. Bicycle repair shops feature espresso drinks.

We dress for the seasons’ rain, umbrellas good against gas. Leaf-blowers to blowback aerosols sifting down on our masks, homemade or for gas. Hockey and lacrosse sticks to return the cannisters to behind the fence.

Maybe we come naked, exposed, worried and afraid or angry and loud. A city's tradition of riding a bike naked from the top of the hills to the river.

Smell the Riot Ribs in the parks between City Hall, Portlandia, the Fed Building, Courthouses. The hostas were once lush there. A bronze statue of a white pioneer points the way as if native people never lived here in large numbers on the riverbank where salmon spawned upstream and century-old trade routes converged.  

We are moms, the displaced, overlooked, veterans, church-goers, atheists, the beaten on and the upbeat who walk and cry for a better day. For justice.

Board up Tiffany’s. Board up the banks.The Pioneer Place shopping mall. The artists come to paint. Show howbacks are stabbed. They give us the dead and butterflies that hope, list the names so we can say them again and again. We know this history. It was nothing to cheer about.

We also know that the untrained federal storm troopers, the mercenaries paid under contract, must go. Must go. Must go

Tricia Knoll moved recently from Portland, Oregon to Vermont to be near family. She lived in Portland for 45 years, worked in the Portland Building, lunched in all the parks adjacent to the courthouse, City Hall, and the Federal Building. She has marched and marched over many years on Portland's streets.

A MESSAGE FROM HOMELAND SECURITY TO ALL NEIGHBORHOOD HOMEOWNERS

by Randy Mazie

We’re breaking into your homes though inconvenient it might be.
We’re going to make sure that you’re as “safe as safe can be.”

We’ve reports of violent protests around your neighborhood.
Yet as far as we can see, your family is good.

If you’ve any family members who could act out violently.
We may cart them off in unmarked cars. guilty prima facie.

This would be for their protection, again “safety is the key.”
And if no one knows where they’re taken, they’re as “safe as safe can be.”

Please do not tell anyone, because our operation you’d jeopardize.
We strongly urge you to keep quiet—talking would not be wise!

Again, we do this for your safety. We’re sure you understand
that the actions that we’re taking secure all Der Homeland.

Randy Mazie wanders the North Georgia Mountains after living in South Florida and growing up in New York City. He’s had the best of all color-filled worlds: the Big Apple, the Balmy Orange and now the Beautiful Blue Ridge. He has Master's Degrees in Social Work from Columbia University and Business Administration from Barry University. His non-fiction has been published in professional journals, fiction in Defenestration, and poetry in numerous media including Light, The MacGuffin, DASH, and the Anthology of Transcendent Poetry, Cosmographia Books, 2019.

NAKED WOMAN CONFRONTS FEDERAL TROOPS

by Richard Garcia 

 I have been granted immunity from my dreams. Just let them try and testify against me. See how far they get on their own. My wife's tribe has begun their journey toward the promised trailer camp. Surely they shall be received and granted a plot of eminence. My wife has been sentenced to remain behind. We shall be protected by Sheela na gig, the naked goddess of history. Surely her maw of origin and its gnashing teeth will frighten away the storm troopers. Just a young woman really, sitting on the macadam with her arms and legs spread open in welcome, a garter snake wrapped around each wrist. But how the soldiers and their attached mob drop their banners in the clouds of teargas and run—they, who had cried out loud in the plaza, Long live death, Long live death! For creatures not accustomed to paradox, this was quite an achievement. Or would have been, if they knew what they were saying. No one knows who distributed the signs and banners. It was long ago. When these people could speak. When they could read, and listen and learn. When I began this testament I still thought it was tomorrow. But I know better now.

Richard Garcia's poetry books include The Other Odyssey from Dream Horse Press, The Chair from BOA, and Porridge from Press 53. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart prize and has been in Best American Poetry. He lives in Charleston, S.C.

I HAVE LOST A COUNTRY

by Robert Knox



 

"What signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?" —Henry David Thoreau


He was thinking about the Fugitive Slave Act,
speaking at an anti-slavery rally along with Sojourner Truth in 1854
after Anthony Burns, who had escaped from bondage,
was arrested in Boston, where he has been
"working quietly in a clothing shop" on Beacon Hill.
It's just one more thing. It happens everywhere.
It's a tipping point.
Someone tips off a slave-catcher, they're hunting up North now,
empowered by federal law.
Burns is hauled before a special judge, in a special court,
created by the law to facilitate claims against persons of color
—"persons"! that Constitutional euphemism—by any white person.

Boston rallies and 'mobs' of protestors war with police,
seeking to free Burns, who is dragged through the streets
by federal marshals with guns drawn, guarded by an artillery regiment
and three platoons of marines, while thousands of angry locals
watch helplessly, cowed by force of arms.
Burns is returned to Virginia, shackled,
and flogged.

At the rally held in Framingham, Mass. on July 4, 1854.
Thoreau confided that he had suffered "a vast and indefinite loss"—
but, he asked himself, what was it? "At last it occurred to me
that what I had lost was a country."

And so, reading in yesterday's newspaper, and again today,
that armed thugs, "federal officers" culled from border police and ICE,
were firing weapons, hurling flash bombs,
and kidnapping protestors from the streets of Portland, Oregon,
where they had no lawful business to be
and where no assistance from the federal government
had been sought by local authorities—
but simply performing in the absence of all legal warrant
as T***p's chosen "Brown Shirts,"

I find myself thrown once again into days of  rage,
unsettled in my mind, as I too often have been
since the dark days of November 2016:
feeling deprived of something valuable, if imperceptible,
dear to me and to many,

that I too have 'lost my country,'
and that finding it again is no sure thing.


Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.