Mimi German

Mimi German joined Occupy Portland in 2011 and Occupy ICE in 2018. She’s an advocate for unhoused people, a massage therapist (who donates her services to activists), a rabble-rouser, a witchy unbroken rebellious woman. She’s also a poet.

She has a style all her own. Her work is nearly prose, though she adds spaces and line breaks. She says unhoused people often have no choice, no clocks, no toilets, no way to get anywhere on time. So she says time keeping in the usual ways of poetry are not important to her. She says you can read it with breaks wherever you need to take breaks. You don’t know who might be speaking, though it’s usually an unhoused person, a friend of Mimi’s. She says she writes in the language of trauma, addiction, intense mental states.

Here’s an example called “The Fallen”

we are not perennial     not a flake of sap to flow
or root     our crump of aging torso falls     leaves
skate on hard fissured earth     frozen     then
wither     hagger     the cold varnish     the
leaf disintegrates into the crumble     truffled fir
boughs lick her curl     the raccoon shadow     the
broken twig of night     this icy pond

Today she gave her first reading of her first published chapbook of poems, Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars (2022, ThePoetryBox.com). She advertised it as a “Houseless Friendly Event” at Revolutions Bookshop and offered free copies of her book to any houseless person. A number of houseless people came. I made photos. In the extras you’ll see a houseless man enjoying the book and Mimi answering someone’s question, “What does your T-shirt say?” Warning: obscenity. Warning removed per Arachne's comment.