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/
