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 1968San 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.

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  • 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/

Posted by Boom California