Here is the strange thing: I was already writing poems about the precariousness of California. I’d been writing them for ten years, since I moved back from New York and came back to the East Bay after two decades away. That was 2011. I had just had a baby. At first, it seemed like I was only trying to make sense of the difference between the California I’d grown up in and the California I came back to, but as I wrote, it seemed like I was also trying to make sense of the world, how it had abruptly shifted under our feet, how radically strange it was to be in a place that was at once so prosperous (some of us have clearly won the revolution for expensive cheese) and yet so broken (so many of us have clearly lost the revolution for equity, affordable housing, decent health care, excellent public schools). When I was away in New York, circling the rungs of publishing (it felt like an endless castle with many locked doors), I had written poems to California, and they amounted to wanting sunshine and a lemon tree. They amounted to missing the tang of sage and eucalyptus on a good day; the mercury glaze of sun in February. Coming back to the suburb I’d left two decades before was a sudden heaven: We could afford a broken bungalow, a yard with two huge redwood trees. We cleared out the weeds and planted that lemon tree. The baby grew.