Photo Credit: Molly Choma When Phillip first suggested that we each write our “goodbyes,” I agreed. But as Phillip and Matty both submitted their drafts, I had yet to write mine. Not because it was too sad, necessarily, but because I had already moved through my feelings about it. The end has been long and slow. It’s a testament to our process. In the same generous way that Backwords Press carried those poems we have carried each other as business partners and most importantl

Right now, in this world, in this country, this state, in small liberal-minded Portland, OR–I’ve been thinking a lot. Reading. Meeting people. Listening. I’m in a gathering period. My fingernails, untended, are too long. I feel slow. I’ve turned off all my social media notifications. The fuzziness, I have faith, will give way to focus. Everything feels necessary, and time is always running out. I’m trying to synthesize everything, but I don’t want to write about it, because l

I’m not going to write about the “orange thing with tiny hands” that I know people in my camp are writing about, talking about, avoiding, bemoaning, resisting, marching, crying, and/or self-medicating over. I won’t mention how “orange face w. tiny hands” on his first day in office overhauled the White House website so that it’s now very clearly missing pages for climate change, civil rights, disabilities, gay rights, and health care. Other news sites have parroted “OFTH’s” th

Suspension. Stop-motion. Start. A slowing. Everything liminal, until it thaws. That’s how we were led into Arcane Collective’s “ebb” at Bodyvox. Opening night was suppose to be on Thursday, until the snow started in Portland and everyone retreated slowly and safely back home. Closures around the city were announced one after the other, and freezing rain confirmed everyone’s reaction, confining us all indoors, encased in ice. So instead, Phillip and I attended the show on Satu

Where do I start? Do I start on Wednesday November 9, 2016 at 4:27 a.m. when I woke up to the confirmation that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States? Do I start somewhere in the middle of my sleep-deprivation, moving through the waking nightmare that Americans elected a glorified reality TV star; a liar and a bully; who repeatedly denigrated immigrants, people of color, and assaulted women; who ran on a platform of massive deportations, on surveillanc

"Matty" Photo Credit: Molly Choma Matty and I are texting back and forth about the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead. At the end of last season, a terrifying sociopath with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire bludgeons someone to death, but we don’t get to see who. Tonight, we find out who dies. Even though Matty and I live together, I didn’t watch it with him.

On the way to the Oregon coast for Labor Day, my partner used Waze a community-based traffic navigation app. Turn by turn directions and traffic alerts piped through the speakers. I am already familiar with Google Maps and GPS – short for global positioning system, which I had to look up because I’ve only ever used GPS to talk about GPS – but I was surprised, delighted, and even unnerved by the future-telling powers that Waze seemed to have: “hazard reported ahead,” “traffic

In 1996, I was twelve years old. Pokemon the cartoon debuted, before smartphones, before Pokemon Go, before you could catch ’em virtually. It was also the same year that my little brother and I were obsessed with the anime series, Gundam Wing. My parents bought and ran a restaurant at the Hillsboro Airport named after the World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker. My family made good money for the first time in our whole lives – serving white people juicy cuts of prime rib –

The first time I saw the gallery, it wasn’t named the High & Low, or the Hi Lo, or the Hi Low, or even the Hi & Lo. It was something else: a punk-black exterior, with large windows and blood-red walls inside. Biking by from my apartment off of 34th and SE Belmont, my third apartment in six months, my gaze was drawn like a moth to the large canvasses of graffiti hanging inside. This period of my life was colored by post break-up malaise. Time’s linearity disappeared. I was obl

It wasn’t that I had forgotten. I couldn’t, even if I tried. The last time I was in this little coastal town was three years ago. It was March, our anniversary weekend. D rented us a little room at the Commodore Hotel. On our second night, we had dinner at Fort George Brewery, because it offered non-seafood mains, because I’ve disliked seafood since I was 6 years-old going on forever. After dinner, D led me out to the pier at the end of 14th Street. We couldn’t see the water,