Biking to Class
Pumping silent Schwinn past children, chicken, strays
in a modern Mexican ghetto as mothers scream Spanish
from lean-to porches and fathers inspect cars in drives,
chicken broth odor hits my nose:
I’m eight, helping granma cook chicken & dumplins
in her brown single-wide trailer with green shag carpet
and hot, black pleather sofas as mom shuffles
me outside while they finish dinner.
As a middle aged woman with sagging brown skin yells
for a lady tottering with a walker not to get mail alone
I smell El Jalapeño—
mom ordering granma’s water,
warning against spicy salsa,
repeating waiter’s questions twenty decibels higher.
Leaving, granma peers at me through cataracts
and skin tags blurring her vision,
mumbling, They think I’m old, don’t they?
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Rich, I think you've done a great job on this revision from last semester. Now the poem screams of more than the grandmother's age, and it's a bit easier to follow the memory-scent of the speaker. In the second stanza, I think there are several details that distract rather than inform. I'd like more information about the speaker's relationship with the granma, as opposed to with his mother.
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