FENCE

      We weren’t exactly tourists anymore, amateurs at crossing over,

       tossing change

      and lint inside their half-cut, empty jugs of milk, nodding as they

       blessed us

      from behind the fence; their scabbed fingers anchored to the plastic’s

       jagged edge,

      heavy with the weight of pity, stares. We weren’t exactly shocked by all

       the begging

      at the border, the women sprawled outside the bridge, sleeping children

       cradled

      in serapes, strapped like hammocks below their mother’s breasts,

       as hordes of flies

      dove at their eyelids and crawled across their swollen cheeks. As sad

       as the scene

      was supposed to be, I still had fun feeding quarters down the slot,

       swinging past

      the metal arms, the rattle from the turnstile louder than pennies dancing

       inside a can.

      We’d matured from trivialities, group photos at the flagpole,

       at the emblem

      of an eagle with a snake perched above a cactus, copper cruelly

       chipping off,

      a metaphor for the landscape of this country. At ten, I had no

       metaphors

      for barefooted boys selling Chiclets like insurance, running after

       every passerby,

      tugging their sleeves, nagging how their gum was cheaper than

       the other guys’.

      But diez centavos was too desperate to translate to my mother’s ears,

       and even though

      she spoke their language, she used her English silence to mute

       their pleas; those shouts

      for discount pharmaceuticals, healing herbs and Freon, strings of garlic

       and streetside

      taco stands drenched in spices I had never smelled. We were them

       without the burden

      of being them, shared last names with them, an economic convenience

       living so close

      to them, but when my mother tugged me closer to her waist, clenched

       the collar

      of my white and sweaty shirt, I heard the tension in her grip saying

       I was not,

      would never be one of them, would play the role of ‘in-between’ instead,

       the relative

      from el otro lado, the boy straddled on the valley of two geographies,

       walking over

      with his stoic, middle-aged mother, unaware that her stay-at-home salary

       didn’t come

      with dental, that her enamel was dissolving, riddled with cavities across

       her molars,

      where she’d thrust and dig with toothpicks, nails, scoop out the half-

       chewed gunk

      of food, repeat the rhythm after every meal. And there came a point

       when all she scraped

      was nerve and gum, when her habit spread into years of sleeplessness,

       aggravated

      by a dentist speaking Spanish too clinical to understand: drilling, talking,

       drilling,

      pausing, yanking out the reasons why we made our trips, those weekend

       afternoons

      crossing back high on anesthesia and lobby candy, staggering past

       the line of women

      still staring through the heavy mesh, and still melting along the shadeless

       pavement,

      wondering, I imagined, how our sloppy smiles tasted.