Bayview Thriftway downtown can be expensive. Very. But I patronize them often because they house one of my favorite Oly places. Upstairs.

I usually buy something first at Dancing Goats espresso bar at the entrance. Good coffee, good pumpkin bread. I might fill this out with fruit and yogurt from the main store. On through past the deli there are stairs leading up.

Nice big room with plenty of chairs and tables and all those windows. This is a prime spot for staying warm while gazing out over the water. Olympics can be seen on clear days.

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go back to the forest if youre gonna hug a damn tree, we dont like you and we gonna chop 'em all down. What do trees and women and people of color and cripples have in common besides a blue gas that leeches from their bark/skin? I knock them down then I cut them up then I rape them, yes I rape trees . side note oly cops smoke weed I have seen it for myself.fudge the police. fudge you argifffiygmipjttrw.

THE CALM EYE OF THE HURRICANE

The tanks and armored bulldozers that rumbled along the Egyptian border,
cutting a line through Rafah,
grinding this colonial borderline wider day by day,
turning half the town into Egypt and the other half into a jailed city
already packed with refugees displaced by the State of Israel in 1948
then displaced again by house demolitions—

The tanks and bulldozers that broke into the neighborhoods
to crunch the houses with their steel blades
or to machine gun anything in sight whether it was made of flesh
or concrete—

The tanks and bulldozers that sat with the vast weight of mortal threats
in the wasteland of raw dirt and concrete wreckage,
spiderweb tangles of rebar reaching out from clumps of debris
and grasping for the sky,
as if they had not come from Israel or America
and were not machines designed by human minds
driven by human hands and commanders’ orders to clear a ‘buffer zone’
along the Egyptian border--
as if instead they were mythic beasts of destruction
and the wasteland in which they sat and moved their natural habitat,
where they were born with a hunger to devour houses and people—

The tanks and bulldozers have gone away,
gone behind the jail wall borders of the Gaza Strip
to wait in some guarded military parking lot,
and the sun smiles down on a man and a boy who drive a donkey cart
through the rubble of a demolished house, collecting scrap metal—

and on my return to this place the sun smiles down
like the calm eye of the hurricane.

* * *

THE HOUSE IS FULL OF HOLES

Counting the holes in the house would be a task as endless
as counting the stars.

Small grey and brown birds flit in and out of the holes,
and beneath their nests inside the cinderblock walls lie the slugs of the bullets
that punctured the first layer of concrete and,
their velocity dimished by this obstacle,
hit the second layer of concrete,
ricocheted,
and fell into the hollow insides of the cinder blocks.

All four sides of the house were machine gunned,
not only the side that faces the Egyptian border,
where tanks parked every day,
but also the sides that adjoined the neighboring houses
before they were demolished,
and the side that faces the dirt road and the city of Rafah.
The porch and part of one wall were demolished;
the family has rebuilt the wall but not the porch.

Abu Ahkmed stands in the yard in the sunshine
chipping residual mortar from a stack of cinder blocks salvaged from the wreckage of another demolished house:
with these he will rebuild the porch
where we sat and drank tea amid the intifada.

The metal cylinder with perforated sides

Do you want to support international solidarity while also having fun? Did you know Oly has had a sister city in Nicaragua for 18 years through the Thurston Santo Tomas Sister County Association (TSTSCA) that is a relationship of solidarity and friendship? This is a FUNdraiser for that project. We're asking a $10 charge to get in and to bring a bit of cheese to share. There will also be a velveeta carving contest, a cheesy talent show and lots of other cheese-related JOY! If you'd like to participate in the velveeta carving contest, bring $3 and your pre-carved obeject. The festival goes from 5 pm - 8 pm Questions?? Email Anna at cheeselovers@gmail.com