BIO
Sara Borjas is a Fresno poet. Her interests include space and time, memory, aromatics, cocktails as poems, tiny prints and oldiez. She currently lectures in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside and lives in Los Angeles.
Fresno Field
after Rick Barot
Out of frontage road. Out of
the
fence flopped to the west. Onto the rows
horizoning
the earth's still dust like corduroy.
On
one side, almond trees and pistachios
and
worker housing with spray painted ads like
truck and mobers and an ocean eventually.
On
the other side orange groves and aqueducts
and
hills crumbling more and more into mountain.
Trucks.
Dogs. Oldiez. Dusk. As many songs
as
there are silences. As many boots on their feet
as
there are people piled into the back of a pick-up.
Cracked
windshields. Paletas. Restaurants run
by
one woman, & one man. The alfalfa field
remaining
mysterious. The junk in their yards
rich
as light breaking over the crest of the Nevadas,
morning
saxaphoning its own desire among kinglets.
What was I talking
about,
talking
about the place of the political in poems, the students
scibbling
down what I said to them. That you have to turn
your
life over like a tortilla on the comal & apply the heat.
What
you don't know about what you do know is that
you
will always leave it out. Somehow it always makes
its
way into the weakest lines. Now, these cupboards
of
pristine pots. Water feeding the lawn all day long.
Engines
hot on the drive way. Waves rising from the road
like
child ghosts. The car turning into the sudden pang
of
what you think is freedom. The mind going over &
over
the same day knowing what to do with it and never
doing
it, knowing what comes next, and reaching, always,
for
something else.