and we go to the farmers’ market, not
where our mother worked back in the 60s
for Gilmore Bank, but the one on Tuesday
afternoons, walking distance to our house,
one-eighth the size of his. I pop a free
blackberry into my mouth, and when
he says he’s never tasted a blackberry,
I don’t ask, How is it you still eat
baloney and iceberg lettuce? Instead, we
stop so he can taste: All the seeds! he
says. He has driven north from eucalyptus
and lemon groves to visit his cloistered
urban sister. Yesterday, we ventured
to the Natural History Museum
in search of dinosaur bones. I touched one,
sixty-five million years old. It was Free
Day, and every child in LA was with us,
wearing a little backpack and pressing
in to see Savannah elephants, of which
only six-hundred thousand remain
in the wild. We drove for miles in cross town
traffic to snare a corned beef sandwich because
there are no delis where my brother lives,
though there are Jewish people. They wander
the San Diegan diaspora, hunting
for a good danish, which my brother did
not find here: This one was both dry and slightly
undercooked. On the freeway, my brother drives
every car he owned as a teenager: the pale
yellow Camaro with the black roof; the Firebird;
the Mazda truck with the Hawaiian print
curtains sewn by one and not the other
of his girlfriends. My brother remembers
the spray booth he made out of our childhood
garage; the Bondo bodywork, the spring break
sanding of the second girlfriend: Now that
was love! He’s cruising Van Nuys Boulevard;
he’s racing Candy Apple Red, still young
and not yet knowing
the danger of an engine more powerful than its body.
A native of Los Angeles, Marci Vogel has published fiction and nonfiction in the Los Angeles Times and the Culver City News. She is completing an MFA in poetry, and her poems have appeared in Colorado Review and Spillway. A past participant of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Vogel was recently nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Award and a Pushcart Prize.
*Photo courtesy of Jacob Whittaker.