A Place People Pass By

By Mary Jean Newcomer


The city where I live

is sliced in half by

eight lanes of the 10.

Day and night truck traffic.

People leaving LA; people on their way.



On one side, Mount San Gorgonio,

where I learn how to share boysenberries with bees,

my hand reaching into a plump purple cluster

inches away from my compadre species,

too occupied with the berries’ juices to notice me.



On the way home, old houses, a library,

an old TB retreat turned into lavender farm.

I go through the underpass of the 10 to the other side, to

Albertsons, Wal-Mart, Rite-Aid, Buffalo Wings, La Casita, Sushi, Boot Barn, Kohls.



My house sits a little further away, near the hills busily regrowing

after the summertime fire. From here, the traffic sounds like a soft steady roar,

surf like. The distant trains rumble a friendly steadiness.

I can see San Jacinto; I learn what it means to feel a mountain’s love.

Solemn and quiet. Enduring.



On my way to somewhere, I see a boy, frozen by Fentanyl, sitting on a rock next to the

Mobil station.

A boy turning into a statue from the inside out.

A homeless man parks his cart, shakes the boy's shoulders, reaches

into his eyes.

I fill my tank and wish.



Had the boy gone into the trails of San Jacinto, sat by the lake and talked with the trees,

would he have found something else?



We live in a place of city, desert, lush, barren,

a kaleidoscope of language, a smorgasbord of tastes, eight different kinds of noodles,

five ways to marinate goat, greens that people back east cannot identify, trees of

almond, citrus,

jujube, pomegranate.

Of Medjool dates.

Of wave after wave of reshaping sea.



We struggle less than we did before we came here.

Would it help if “I don’t know what to do?” became ‘what if....?”