Watching television through
a wire mesh fence
by Patria Rivera

On Friday nights after school we’d hie off to a grassy lot

beside the rich man’s house, set up wooden stools outside

the wire mesh fence. We’d watch Lassie and Lucy and Desi,

but most especially John Wayne lassoing bandits

and dumping them into the OK Corral. We never understood

their words, we didn’t speak English, but we sighed

and gawped at those wondrous manes, marvelled at

those huge horses galloping into our dreams. Mosquitoes feasted

on our grubby thighs, bore their hunger into our marrow.

On starry nights, we forgot our milk-can games by the moon,

forsook patintero for evenings that paraded endless cowboys

and dogs saving children from snowstorms or the ice-thaw.

We crooned with Bing and dreamt of White Christmases,

of chestnuts roasting on an open fire, when back home,

small dried fish, most likely, sat by the wood stove.

We watched behind the backs of the rich man’s sons

and daughters in their warm chesterfield, oblivious of the eyes

that saw through thin wire holes. Then one Friday noon

a concrete wall stood where once a wire mesh fence gave us

passage into a world shorn of sweltering heat, a world bathed

in the soft light of snowdrifts and apple blossoms.


© Patria Rivera