The martini glass lights up the Portland West Hills for anyone in eyeshot, a landmark of the year’s end. Street Roots vendor and poet George McCarthy notices it.
“Like all homeless people, I’m looking for pieces of home, little rags of memory … the city is collaged with little bits of my thoughts — the places I’ve slept, the people I’ve known — even the big martini glass in the hills I’ve put good thoughts into standing over a highway praying for a better year for everyone …”
It’s reassuring to think of being the recipient of McCarthy’s good thoughts and prayers, as he wrote in his prose poem for the annual Street Roots Holiday Zine. I found this collection of creative writing and art by Street Roots vendors to be a guidebook to, well, “finding joy in chaos” — the zine’s title and theme.
So much of the political tumult in the city is built from talking at or past people experiencing homelessness rather than listening. As Marlon Crump puts it, too often, “we are surrounded by so many judges, but no lawyers.”
Chaos, in these pages, is the insecurity of getting one’s needs met. It’s the challenge of overcoming homelessness.
“Life’s thrown me a glitch,” Nicole Pater writes. “The picture’s been unframed.”
Dan Newth — who moved into housing during the pandemic and now sells papers to make his rent — describes security as “the rabbit we dogs chase after.”
And for Randy Humphreys, who, like Newth, recently moved into housing from long-term homelessness, chaos is what surrounds the challenge of making and meeting appointments, often in the form of a “Slip of paper with a date and time/ An appointment I could keep/ If only a bigger space were mine.”
While he points out that the chaos of managing his possessions in a small space hasn’t changed a whole lot: “But instead of calm and order/ My small room just makes things harder/ I once had a tent bigger than this room/ They say it’s just for transition.”
One thing has changed: “My room is more meaningful than a tent/ Though they are both as messy/ There’s no one else around to make it worse/ This chaos is mine.”
For Nettie Johnson, the chaos is in the crises of “housing and drug addiction.” George McCarthy writes, “sometimes I think that people are desperately trying to orient themselves like bats in the darkness ...”
For McCarthy, chaos is a mind that ceases differentiation with the city: “the grey limbo of my mind — this miasma that I live and breathe in — has climbed out of my head and set up shop in the world around me. Draining the color out of the sky, stripping the concrete bare, walking off with all the leaves. There was no inside or outside, up or down.”
In the city that has become an extension of himself, McCarthy finds beauty:
“Then I saw it in the street: a spiral of lava luxuriating on the cement — like it corkscrewed here from Mt. St. Helens and tunneled up, leaving a trail of melted glass to stretch like a cat and set the sidewalk on fire.”
The passage that follows includes more of that stunning description: “Pieces of fire scattered down the stairs, a tiger tail hanging out of a garbage can, trails leading around corners, orchid petals piled up near a stop sign and a great heart-shaped piece set into the creosote of a telescope pole like a blazing shield I could see all the way down the street. I’ve set them up myself in places across the city like standards — pieces of cantaloupe memories of campfires — little suns.”
Maddy Brown-Clark writes a story of a woman caring for her mother with dementia, who finds love with a Street Roots vendor on the city streets and ends with the sweet image of the two characters racing each other in their wheelchairs along the Willamette River. Kat Black, too, sees love as an antidote: “The world is full of chaos because/ We all need to fall in love again.” Bronwyn Carver titled a drawing of intertwined figures “Out of Madness Holding Onto Love.”
Street Roots vendors, whether homeless or not, occupy public places a great deal of time. Dumpsta D celebrates all the people he meets — passersby, customers.
“You’re the young mother who gave your shy five-year-old son the cash to hand me for your paper. You’re the store clerk who came out on a blazing hot day to ask if I was OK and if I needed some water. You’re the old-school punk who got all excited when we realized we had both seen the same bands. You’re the friend of an old friend. We held onto each other tight after you told me you had just survived a fight with breast cancer.”
Each year, vendors sell this holiday zine from Thanksgiving through Christmas. It’s necessary reading. Please pick it up for yourself and more copies as gifts. Street Roots vendors are working hard to earn income, and all the money you spend on the $4 zine, $1 paper, and tips goes directly into their pockets.
This year’s zine was edited by Street Roots vendors McCarthy, Carver, Newth, Leo Rhodes and Brown-Clark through coordination by zine editor Haley Grieco-Page and designer Kanani Cortez. Phoenix Oaks, the Street Roots artist who previously worked as a vendor and now creates much of our artwork, including this year’s holiday card, painted the cover — a glowing tent holding steady under a galaxy-strewn sky.
I know I’m keeping this zine close, a guidebook to centering myself as I grapple with political maneuvering that serves powerful interests. The writing in this collection, instead, centers love, compassion and collective concern. We are all well served by McCarthy’s description of the effort it takes to find joy:
“When you’re homeless, you seek out joy, you hunt it down because it doesn’t surprise you enough — you look for completeness like you scavenge for everything, even the deep feelings of your own heart.”
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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