Kids of the Rocket Engineer

Kids of the Rocket Engineer
We just moved to California, zoomed 
over the sky and hung up our sleds. 
At ocean’s haunches we put on our forever shorts 
and go-aheads, leaving behind a red brick firehouse’s
one-room school and Aunt Fritzi’s gefilte sandwiches
for the hopalong West. Dad’s a man with a badge
and a slide rule. He drills us on square roots. 
We’re going past the exosphere, he says,
but today we’ll skate with you Italians and Greeks 
down Seventh Street’s humps, bump
to the dump and rattle on pocked cement 
under fronds of pepper trees. 
My old man fished here before you
invented space, you say, as we pedal fast 

past your aunts in black on red porches 
shouting words with upturned toes. We all sling 
kelp under the lifeguard’s chair, Danilovich 
and Pappadakis browning the same. 
Whether your father looks out to sea or up 
to sky, Nick’s dad is right when he says a family 
has everything here: spread 
table, grandfather snoring down the hall. 
We are all the day’s catch. 
Here, we all belong to the ocean.