High-speed rail is under construction in 2024 near downtown Fresno. Some say the city is in the middle of everywhere.

“I’ve driven by a few times” is the most common response I get when I tell folks I’m from Fresno.

I can imagine them on the I-5 headed to the Bay Area or Los Angeles, seeing a sign for Fresno and not knowing that they are still 50 miles west of downtown. I do my best to hold my tongue while flashing a peace sign. I say: “Thank you for driving by and FresYes forever!”

As the former poet laureate of Fresno, I’m a dutiful ambassador for my city and one of its harsher critics. You have to love this place to know its flaws and see its beauty. Our poets thrive on the outside world’s propensity to overlook what goes on here. We’re like a row of oleanders in full bloom, flourishing in heat and drought, pink and poisonous in the middle of the highway, splitting orchards of citrus trees and 500-foot wind turbines. This place perplexes us with its endless contradictions. And it has a gravity that pulls us back.

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I spent 10 years living away from Fresno. I went to Berkeley for college and Los Angeles for a change of scenery. I’ll admit, part of me thought I had to get out. Writers traveled, I was told. They lived in romantic cities like New York and Paris. They hung out in cafes and alleyways like the Beats in San Francisco. They cruised the gritty bus lines through Charles Bukowski’s L.A.

But when I sat down to write in these other places, all that came out were poems about Fresno, poems about my childhood, poems about the neighborhood four generations of my family called home. Getting some distance created space to really see Fresno for what it was, all its grandeur and flaws. I opened the valve, and grief came pouring out.

“I wonder / if it is better to disappear into Aztlán........

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