angelito
by AurelEo Sans
Linda Sormin, Labyrinth, glazed ceramic and mixed media, 26.6 x 25.6 x 18 inches, 2022. Photo credit: Dave Schmitz, courtesy of the Artist and Patricia Sweetow Gallery.
angelito
Aureleo Sans | ocT 2023 | Issue 28
Like me, Falcon grows extra hair but then he grows brown feathers and eventually brown wings — soft wings, wings like memory foam pillows. We’ve called him a bird all his life on account of an eye that drifts like a breeze. Now, he’s turned into one. Maybe this is the power of words.
I’m the first person he shows. I can tell he’s scared about how I’ll react. He’s scared about what’s happening to him but I tell him, “Don’t worry. We are all changing all the time.”
His wings are not the working kind; he can’t lift off the ground and I wonder what’s the point of wings that don’t fly. Luz, his Moms, finds out and stars fill her eyes. She says he’s the chosen one come to right us of our wrongs and bring us to our knees and to salvation and that she always knew in her heart of hearts that he was. At the kitchen stove or church pulpit, she crows, boasting that he’s un milagro and will be the first ever saint to come from the hood and then the Pope will definitely have to visit and bless her and her comadres, even Chela who treats men like old shoes, with holy water and everything all the time will be better. She will become the biggest celebrity, like Madonna but you know for reals. She begins advertising the shit out of her “angel son” — what she calls him. She’s so proud, acting like she’s done something big time, but to be honest, not everyone thinks he’s a good thing. People talk:
“El niño es una maldición.”
“Maybe she drank too much Red Bull during pregnancy and he got wings. Get it?”
“He’s a disturbed youth and should be caged like the bird that we know he is.”
“He’s a minor devil, one of them helpers of Lucifer, maybe even his offspring.”
“He’s a monster, a mutant, and a mistake.”
“He’s a human chicken and un pato.”
“Somebody should send that fucker back to the freak show so he can stop putting curses on us and turning our little boys gay.”
Every time we hear one of these “theories,” we tell those dumbasses to eat an XL bag of dicks.
Anyways, none of that bullshit matters. To me, he’s a celestial aerodynamic body. His body streamlined, striated edges engineered for flight one day. A heavy metal body. I’m not talking about the substance but the music. When he peacocks and displays his full wingspan, my breath flies away like I want to. He’s the sexiest angel I’ve ever seen.
Not that everything’s perfect. At school, we don’t soar. For years, us students have been educated on the art of sniffing out difference and jockeying for position, bully arithmetic. Of course, the other kids make fun of Falcon’s wings when the truth is really everybody wants a pair. All of us ask our parents why we don’t have wings and they reply that real boys weren’t made that way. With his back turned, the boys call him a “lame-ass overgrown pigeon” and rip off his feathers, and when he turns around and yells, “What the fuck,” they rip off another and this goes on and on until some days the bottoms of his wings are bald pink and the floor is covered, and I never know what to do or say because I don’t want the entire grade to turn against me and once I try, I scramble and gather the lost feathers into a bouquet but then I drop them because I know I can’t make up for what was taken.
aureleo sans is a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused writer and poet with a disability who resides in San Antonio, Texas. She has been named a Sewanee Writers Conference Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, a Roots Wounds Words Writers Retreat Fellow, a Lambda Literary Fellow, an ASF Workshop Fellow, and a Periplus Fellow. Her work has appeared in Shenandoah, Electric Literature, Passages North, the 2023 Best Micro Fiction Anthology, and elsewhere.
Linda Sormin explores fragility, upheaval, migration, survival, and change through sculpture and site-responsive installations. She was a 2021 and 2023 participant at European Ceramic Workcentre in the Netherlands, creating new work for three exhibitions: Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, USA (October 16, 2021 - April 2, 2023), No Boundaries at Messums, London, UK, a solo exhibition at Messums, Wiltshire (March 5 – May 1, 2022), and a two-person exhibition at Peach Corner Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (September 29 – November 5, 2022).
Sormin lives and works in New York City, and is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She has taught ceramics at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College and Alfred University. Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. She has a BA in English Literature and worked in community development for four years in Thailand and Laos. She received degrees from Andrews University (BA, English Literature, 1993), Sheridan College (Diploma, Craft and Design, 2001) and Alfred University (MFA, Ceramic Art, 2003). Sormin’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, USA), Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY, USA), Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Arizona State University Museum, (Tempe, AZ, USA), World Ceramic Exposition (Gyeonggi Province, Korea), and Schein-Joseph Museum of Ceramic Art (Alfred, NY, USA).