What I Know About Fresno

by Sara Borjas

How the train tracks veer away from me
the tremendous bellies of the grain holders
and their side-wined staircase and how it
makes me believe magic exists, the dry
 

                 grass coming up
through the abandoned cement abandoned
always abandoned since before they were
ever there, the small yield. The majestic
symmetry of the crop row, the orange,
the alfalfa, the walnut, the corn, the grape
 

                 teaching the famers
minds and the workers hands how to handle
their laws and their skin, how to be so afraid
of their absence which is the same, as loves’
eyes closed. I know how the silt left
dry at the bottom of an irrigation ditch
 

                 keeps itself, lays down
low and huddles in. I know the water truck
the sun washed teal of the hammered metal
body. I know Levis heard birds and thought
about the spirit, the name of the knot inside
of each and every presence somehow strung
 

                 together like a single breath—
I know the oil trains going by like my own heart,
the ragged climbing and falling, stopping and
jerking, the graffiti a present from each little
gangbanger who doesn’t know they’re an artist
in my life. I know the single house built
 

                  like an oasis
in the middle of vines, the imported palm trees,
the long clean driveway like a road to somewhere
through nowhere. The power station of transformers,
the avenues, the graveled shoulder of the road,
the dairy cows and their short dirty lives already
 

                  behind them.
When my arms are open the dirt scuttles
beneath my nails like sea creatures. I know
somewhere beyond that row of Eucalyputus
resembles a river. I know the Trump signs
are the people I never saw living here and
 

                 the reason I stay
teaching myself, so I can come back to them
with a gift that bursts. I know the F150,
the chrome lights, the racing stripe, the rims
are the pride I feel when I say Fresno. I say
Fresno every day to keep mind clean,
 

                 my breath swept,
my sky cottoned my gravel loose my roads
veering my grass growing even when dying
or dead my rows straight my rows straight
my rows leading me forward, which is
sometimes the same thing as backwards,
 

                 which is sometimes
the same thing as pride, which is sometimes
the same thing as afraid. I know I will die here.
I know the chain link around the water pump,
the electrical poles like thousands of crosses
 

                 erected in my heart
and this valley is the dirt planting each of them.
I know the coyotes howl, the sunset call,
the horizon disappearing behind the line
showing me how to draw myself above it.

The Beach at Sunset

By Eloise Klein Healy

The cliff above where we stand is crumbling

and up on the Palisades
the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt.

Art Deco palm trees sway their hula skirts
in perfect unison
against a backdrop of gorgeous blue,

and for you I would try it,
though I have always forbidden myself to write
poems about the beach at sunset.

All the clichés for it sputter
like the first generation of neon,
and what attracts me anyway

are these four species of gulls we’ve identified,
their bodies turned into the wind,
and not one of them aware of their silly beauty.

I’m the one awash in pastels
and hoping to salvage the day, finally turning away
from the last light on the western shore

and the steady whoosh of waves driving in,
drumming insistently like the undeniable data
of the cancer in your breast.

We walk back to the car
and take the top down for the ride home
through the early mist.

No matter what else is happening,
this is California. You’ll have your cancer
at freeway speeds. I’ll drive and park

and drive at park. The hospital
when I arrive to visit will be catching
the last rays of the sun, glinting

like an architectural miracle realized.
I realize a miracle is what you need—
a grain of sand, a perfect world

Pennies for the Opera

by Tongo Eisen-Martin

Our perfect confidence in the sun

In commemoration

every tambourine a thousand miles in every direction
playing in a California rent party

rattlers dancing and bleeding over God’s non-whitened skin

waiting for the cornfield to shrug
we are forgetful

but your ancestors nevertheless

slowing down the poem to the speed of sweet light

the speed of  bedless deaths
the bones of  fast friends near a pile of first fruits

a pile of  imperialist failings

oppressor and oppressed give their guns the same nickname

underground working-class sort of goes back to school
sort of studies revolution

The summer belongs to itself  now
As does a sharecropper’s God
As does the death mask

Real advice from Malcolm
Real rose chords over my Memphis skeleton
a tenor part before dying
playing to our waning blood pressure
our penny-plated gun (the last of the spacetime) tucked

white people would have sold us standing naked on anything
sold us off a huge garden crystal
or peacock  feather
would have sold us off  of  a stack of
doo-wop records if  they could
would have sold us off of the
perfection of the cosmos

Forestry of  drug paraphernalia
Suburb spikes in the grass
Syringe jungle like a sick bed’s sick bed

execution needle that became a society’s bottleneck
Preamble noose-talk
or nuclear scientist thanked for their work

Activists who don’t scream Black power/rather Black component

A painful season
Season gone sentient
and well-dressed
taken as a whole
taken in puppet skin

a sentient Sunday that married fifteen sticks of dynamite

we are houseless now
and dancing our waistlines into a courtroom floor

Atlantic ocean throwing my voice into the city weeds
City weeds of the other other confederacy

I would double down on this poem
on this gang friendship

signs of apocalypse in all directions
I would run this poem into the ground

on my fifth skipped meal
“today, Lord, we become even better friends”

dollar store notebooks in a mass context
pen cap full of bullets
California color line as played out with necro protest types who sleep on the other other earth
While
We are waiting to shoot on a muralist’s behalf
This waiting to shoot: an old man’s truancy of sorts
or tear stain on a Panther pamphlet

houseless bookseller speaking about little Bobby the conqueror

A crisis of open-air corrections
Chemical extradition
And war songs wearing off
Around the corner from South Texas
You pretended that prison is a river
You married your american cop

Black skin/white mantras

Like normal-speed bullets changing a normal life

Like walking back to the united states in defeat

My California

by Lee Herrick

Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit,
the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens,

graduate school and good pot. A group of four at a window
table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi.

Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano
poet whose songs still bank off Fresno's beer-soaked gutters

and almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California
we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy

you'd know we'd done this before. In Fresno, the bullets
tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day.

In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace.
In my California, you can watch the sun go down

like in your California, on the ledge of the pregnant
twenty-second century, the one with a bounty of peaches and grapes,

red onions and the good salsa, wine and chapchae.
Here, in my California, paperbacks are free,

farmer's markets are twenty-four hours a day and
always packed, the trees and water have no nails in them,

the priests eat well, the homeless eat well.
Here, in my California, everywhere is Chinatown,

everywhere is K-Town, everywhere is Armeniatown,
everywhere a Little Italy. Less confederacy.

No internment in the Valley.
Better history texts for the juniors.

In my California, free sounds and free touch.
Free questions, free answers.

Free songs from parents and poets,
those hopeful bodies of light.

Head back to the Our California page.