Caprice Garvin
Friendship Park
On this plaza
bordering
San Diego and Tijuana,
A mother and daughter
Touch fingertips
Through thick steel mesh.
A rustling, like ribbons
Windblown from a child’s hair
Storms up the bars,
Confounding the wall’s height.
Trash undone
By festival-goers hands,
Rises as kites.
The child doesn’t turn
To see carton
Feather into a bird
But sees flight
In her mother’s eyes
And believes it real.
She asks for wings, planes,
A swing to swing
That high.
The steel catches
The light of the sun,
Becomes a river on a kite’s tail,
Saturates the air
With the sound of fingertips
Brushing, like palm leaves,
The underside of grace.
Editor’s Note: Located within the Border Field State Park in California’s San Diego county, the half-acre Friendship Park includes a section of the border fence that divides the US and Mexico. On the US side, the park was formerly part of the Monument Mesa picnic area, but is now under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security and is heavily monitored by U.S. Border Patrols.
Caprice Garvin writes: I have an M.F.A. in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, but have not been previously published. It took the Trump administration to motivate me to do so.
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