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/