hops on the other side of the barbed wire
seizes the girl’s sad stare
         the girl who is watched by her mother
           dressed by her mother
           taught what to say by the mother
who stands thirty yards behind, in the empty field of sand
in a cherry-print dress, her black eyes scrunched like a squeeze-ball.

in the afternoon heat,
the kind of heat that makes a breath a marathon
the girl will stay with fists clamping the fence
with all the strength hidden behind her skeletal frame.
and she will wonder why
a feathered bird will travel farther than she.