Did
take the 135th line, from
the hairy interstice, I helped grandma lift
her same old bicycle
onto the moving box,
we rode, frog & toad,
all the way
to the discount market, whose name
I forgot, but
something about a grand life,
the fat security man said, jeesh,
you, two, are early, and in
she went, squeezed
her whole body into the pack
of necks, her buttocks
bobbing, appeared
with cabbage, cloves, carrots, celery, legs
of a dead chicken, the way
she gripped was
that of a rodent, the same old recipe
was the way
she forgets,
food in the micro-
wave, was how she joked
of dementia, that
the China of her youth
was the China of
starvation. It’s lucky that I am here,
now. Not a river. Not a soup. In droplets,
her tears at her chin—
the way old people do it
—told me
I will regret
what I said, as time
goes on. A summer morning, I
clung to her fat old abdomen, and
in her unrelenting
pedaling, we wavered, as if,
amidst the sultry street, we burped,
and burped, this whole time.