Omar Pimienta
This is not a lie it’s not a lie about the lie a lie that prolongs the lie this is the truth the only truth Anastasio Hernández-Rojas (San Luis Potosí 1968 – San Diego †2010) stole a bottle of wine a bottle of wine to celebrate mother’s day his own his children’s prison and deportation beatings and electricity the only truth is death it can be seen it can be heard the lie spreads until it creates a discourse but the truth is this: people die and the truth most real is this: there are people who die in the hands of others who believe killing is part of their job Anastasio Hernández-Rojas (San Luis Potosí 1968 – San Diego †2010) screamed so they would stop beating him they beat him because he screamed the people heard the people heard even though they didn’t want to sound is more stubborn than image the eye is more afraid than the ear the truth just like fear is felt few were able to translate the scream others screamed to let him go someone asked like he did for help others wanted to ignore this and crossed the border this is not a lie it’s not a lie about the lie this is the truth the last truth.
- Translated by by Jose Antonio Villarán.
Omar Pimienta is a Tijuana-based artist and writer. His work examines questions of identity, migration, citizenship, emergency poetics, landscape, and memory, and his work is currently on display as part of the unDocumenta exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art. He has published four books of poetry in México and Spain, and his newest book, The Album of Fences, with translations by Jose Antonio Villarán, is forthcoming with Cardboard House Press.
Copyright: © 2017 Omar Pimienta. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/