Omar Pimienta
an agent suspects of her
suspects of him suspects of me
suspects himself and above all suspects the baby
his work to suspect suspicious
everything about you is suspect: your glasses are suspicious
your books are suspicious
your car is suspicious
the cloudy day is suspicious
the picture on your ID is suspicious
your last name is suspicious
your ears are particularly suspicious
your fingerprints
above all are very suspicious
she carries a newborn
he looks at the IDs
there’s no picture that’s true to a baby
there’s no ID that can assure
that you are you at 10 days after arriving to the party
every father or mother suspects
during the first 10 days
where that baby came from
suspicion is part of the cog
that churns when the world moves
a suspicious customs officer
suspects asks her to pull out her breast
she suspects he suspects her breasts
asks her to breast-feed
if that child is hers there will be milk
if not the suspicion will be certain
she does it
he asks her to do it again
during the first attempt the amount of milk
was suspiciously small
she does it again
he allows her to cross
and the line of suspects moves on.
- Translated by by Jose Antonio Villarán.
Omar Pimienta is a Tijuana-based artist and writer, and Ph.D. candidate at in Literature at UC San Diego. 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/
