#129 / 2010 Spring Marfa, Texas: My Poem for Teresa Margolles

TERESA MARGOLLES

#129

Ballroom Marfa:
“Irrigation, 2010”

The eight-foot screen images a large tanker-truck
spraying water on an empty Texas highway.

When it hits hot pavement, it becomes the voice

of the voiceless.

The tracks seem to be the dark residue of screams

and shouts.
This is “Registration of Action, Irrigation of Highway 90,
Presidio County, Texas,” by Teresa Margolles.


A forensic death artist from Mexico City.

She speaks from the shadows,
“I wanted the water to hiss, to sound like screams.”

Clad in overalls, a modest persona reflects

the ars moriendi:
artistic possibility of human remains.
the transfer of proof of violence into the world of art.

She leans her small, dark frame against the wall
Indian braids descend past her masculine profile
but her soft voice says:

“Violence is a habit; violence is a cultural phenomenon,”
she explains in her cadaver-speak,
“listen to what the dead have to say.

This art represents the screams of over 500 people
who were murdered in Juarez
within the first three months of 2010.”

I can envision them sprawled in their demise,
all ages, genders, left like crumbs from a Day of the Dead feast,
slaughtered with American weapons,
our southbound illegal immigrants

that work to harvest cadavers

in an endless season of death.

Teresa used her fake Press Pass
to flit past the policia 
sop up blood, brain tissue, entrails,
with clothing of all types, old jeans, cloth rags,
took them home to dry for one month
in the hot sun of Huitzilopochtli,

rendered them up to the solar warrior-god 
as if she were an Aztec princess.

When the fabrics were re-hydrated, she filled

the tanker truck with la sangre del pueblo

 crossed into El Paso

with resurrected Mexican blood

from the sticky streets of Death City
and repaved the smugglers coyote route

250 miles north of the border near  Presidio, Texas,
decanting down an overlay of Truth

on this artery to Juarez.

“Aren’t you afraid of retaliation,”
I asked. She merely shrugs:
“Fear is a fact of life in Juarez.”

Is she mystic Santa Teresa defying

drug cartels and death squads;
is she Sor Juana among the dead and dying;

is she Frida Kahlo with Trotsky’s death on her mind,

or  just the forensic technician from Mexico City morgues,
a political artist who gives Death one last say?

She writes the victim’s history in blood

hot enough in the veins of memory to speak

when itt hits the highway from the tanker-truck
with a hissss.

by Pamela Hirst

*Teresa Margolles, the Mexico City forensic technician and artists, and her work referred to here were part of an art exhibit in Marfa, Texas, at Ballroom Marfa (March 26-August 10,2010, which included several other artists from Mexico. The exhibit was titled: In lieu of Unity – an artistic collection of responses to social dynamics as they play out5 in specific locations in Mexico. The author of this poem saw this exhibit earlier this year. 
published in MalPais Reviewn

Autumn 2010