“A Mossy City” | A Poem from the Publisher’s Desk

Moss is soft

and layered

and low to the ground.

It thrives in shade 

and requires time.

Hey; hold my drink.

I need to talk this out.

I need to talk about it with my whole body.

I learned how to do that there.

How to speak with my hands

when my mouth can’t expel all of this emotion.

How to lift my eyes up when I’m told to keep my head down.

How to call on my voice when my mind won’t keep quiet.

My body remembers what the city taught it.

Like how to read a room, and how,

when tensions rise,

to meet it with movement, not panic.

The way moss meets the rain:

Absorbing what might otherwise drown it.

Let me check my shoulders.

Let me check my jaw.

I shift my weight.

Unfurrow my brow.

And let the lesson breathe.

See, breath is the barometer.

Calm is the compass.

Rain changes plans, not purpose.

They want to reign over us?

Well, Portland is a mossy city.

And moss spreads where light can’t reach.

Portland taught me that skin is a notebook—

a place to keep what won’t stay quiet.

Ink marks what we’ve carried and refuse to erase.

Tattoos, like protests, are stories that they cannot displace.

Permanence is an act of faith.

And we’re not going anywhere.

They call us antifa

like it is an insult.

Like resistance isn’t the only language left

when power declines to listen.

This time it started in sundresses and khaki shorts,

sitting criss-cross-applesauce

with signs that say “FAMILIES BELONG TOGETHER.” “NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL.”

They call it chaos.

Now we wear gas masks

and ride our bikes naked through their war zone.

They call it “fire,”

say it’s “burning to the ground,”

then send mean men, armed and greedy,

to throw pepper balls and tear gas—

a smoke screen

to distract from a name on a list,

to distract from a genocide

where “war zone” is not a metaphor or a lie.

Where explosive robots level hospitals,

schools become shelters,

water systems demolished,

feeding babies grass and dirt,

nowhere else to go.

And yet the cameras point to Portland?

To spray paint on plywood,

a toppled fence,

someone shouting “justice” in the rain,

fist raised?

As if broken glass in Portland

is worse than broken bodies in Palestine.

As if grief with a microphone

is more dangerous than grief under siege.

I know how grief can tighten in the chest,

and I know that laughter can loosen it again.

They hate it when we laugh—

it sounds too much like surviving.

They call us lawless

so that they don’t have to call it what it is—

an occupation, annihilation,

a wound too wide for their talking points.

They call it out of control—

because control is all they’ve ever worshiped.

They call us radicals

as if empathy were extreme.

They name us the enemy,

and some will start to believe it.

And some will want to believe it.

But I have traveled this country,

and Portland is the best of us.

Portland taught me to hold candles in memoriam,

to read murals, 

and tip buskers 

when I wonder what it’s all for.

Portland taught me that the body can be both protest and prayer,

to remember what hurt,

and to celebrate what survived.

Portland taught me

how to grow in the cracks,

how to stay green under gray.

Moss is a master of survival.

It can dry out completely and then reawaken

at the first touch of water.

And Portland is a mossy city.

We are angry.

And scared—

of silence,

of forgetting,

of what happens when no one shows up.

But fear doesn’t stop us;

it steadies us.

And what’s more patriotic

than loving your home enough

to fight for it?

This is my love letter—

to a city that taught me

that revolution smells like sweat,

that tenderness can march in Doc Martens,

that sometimes you have to shout

just to stay human.

And still,

we keep showing up,

hands raised,

our bodies speak louder than the lies.

Portland taught me

how to snap and when to shout “new shit!”

And how to spot the blue and white strobing lights in a place where I can dance with my whole body.

They call it burning.

We call it breathing.