Photo by Celina Su.

His ardor turned into an antelope-shaped ice sculpture, its taste and shape memorialized
at film festivals all over Spain. Hers fossilized into ambivalent scorn, trapped under a notebook in Arkansas.

Whenever you wish to, you may conjure me. If I were little beside these digital images,
serving as half-erased traces of whatever latest—or oldest—interpretation you attempt to
inscribe in pixilated ink.

Global landscapes are not altered alone, or via central planning. Think of the big bowl in
Brasília, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the route between kitchen and bathroom where you
live. I see the steps we have taken; our gloves sit listlessly at the bottoms of our drawers,
bins, knapsacks. My hands are frostbitten, his bear the burns from last summer. Still, this is
migration, this is the making of homes.

These days, Beijing counts the number of “blue sky days” each year on a single hand. Acrid
yellow sandstorms from Ulaanbaatar lash against Tokyo, against Juneau, against San
Francisco. The waters no longer sing.

 
Celina Su is the author of Landia, forthcoming from Belladonna* in 2018. She was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York.

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