Jurupa Hills / Riverside
Why so urgent to sum what’s tendered
season’s tremulous drifting
weathers our numeric edges
I break apart green announces
butterfly tempests signatories
for rain’s dialects rippled on hills
I come glimpsed asking towards
what words have no words for
To remain settled pre sums I
where here I’s remainder may own
more than any body should claim
I have refused each offer still
I don’t know how to decline wonder
lemons hanging over walls
hibiscus trees unfolding red
birds of paradise here every
colonial experiment’s proliferating
Enclosure does not negate beauty
beauty complicates what’s ill faring
which is this land which
doesn’t owe me a damn thing
I’m halted by broken sidewalks
profuse with weeds burclover
bull thistle their small possible
Copyright © 2023 by Aaron Boothby. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Jurupa Hills / Riverside’ comes out of a continued project of writing poetry of place, in this case the neighborhood of Riverside, California, where I grew up, and in the hills around the city where ancient scrub oaks are some of the oldest living things on earth, struggling with even less frequent rains than before. There is so much beauty in the landscape and gardens. It is also irrevocably marked by colonial violence and capitalism. Questioning how I am here, as much as why, can be an opening into understanding what is there.”
—Aaron Boothby
Aaron Boothby
