Motherland: You Are the Remembrance Long Forgotten

“The only truth is reality.”

—A dictator

Oblivion gallops inside your veins.Your legs give wayAnd your eyes no longer hear the colorsOf the untainted barrio.

Your mouth opensFilled with the frailty of a remote waveAs you try to paint my surface with your derailed handYou only cough criesFull of the clandestine pass of time.

You’ve forgotten who you wereAnd you don’t even know who you areAnd now you don’t even recognize me.

Our origin lies severedin your breathing captive of the hoursgunned by the tumult of immolated faces,inertin the precise instantin which they nail their kisses of iron to your side.

And you don’t even know and will never know.

A drop falls—not of iron, nor of blood—but of plasticthat unhinges like the steps of painand spills from the juncture of your lipsarrivingsecure, intactlike them,to screw you.

Qué?What are you talking about?No. I don’t know anything about that.

There were never any dead hereNor bastard IndiansNor pasts, and forgotten histories,Nor the beatings you received recently.

Here happiness shinesin the smiles fulminated by hunger.In the dirt floorswhere they plot dailythe immense nakedness of the criesof thosewho confront the violence of the tombstonesonly with a lookwithered by the weight of the dead.

I remain lost in 1911,in 1934 with my friend Carias,in 1983 with my friend Alvarez Martinez,Today in you,erased in the snow shellfire.

Nothing.Nothing has happened here,“nothing is happening and nothing will ever happen.This is a happy pueblo.”