summer salt
by Aureleo Sans
Linda Sormin, Banua Ginjang, glazed ceramic, gold leaf, found string, discarded plastic 3D misprints, epoxy resin, watercolor on paper, 25 x 30 x 26 inches, 2022. Photo credit: Dave Schmitz, courtesy of the Artist and Patricia Sweetow Gallery.
summer salt
Aureleo Sans | Feb 2024 | Issue 30
I remember your mop broom eyes, the Fabuluso iguanas, your fingers unseaming, the sad days of salt, the bottles of spic n span. Back then I didn’t know what spic meant. I remember cartons of Fab, the granules of white like cocaine and talc. Then, I existed in the reverb of waves and around the perimeter of the beachside hotel.
Your boss banned me. Customers had complained. I was left outside wanting in. During your Days of Order, I pined for unwashed comfortered beds, episodes of Weird Science. The TV sets at the Emergency Intake Shelter lacked cable. At the homeless school, teachers taught: The things that you can’t afford will define you. Scooping up currency, scooping up chipi chipi shells by the seashore, scooping up all the horizon colors. They always ended in the trash. Glimmer dulls when dry.
On gravel street bellies, I made dirt angels. Chewing purple Bazooka and tossing Mary Jane, I took a census of scrawny fields. Too many fire ants and house crickets. Once, I kissed the ocean. Once, the salt farewelled the sweet; the waves jazzed; my body capsized. Did I ever know how to swim? Staring cranes. Their yellow irises darkening. Like the old men detecting metal, I read too much into the sand. Longed to know how to sand castle. A turret is a mollusk, is a home, and maybe I, too, could live in shells. In the waning hours, an offering: a corner of saltine tucked between raised digits. The laughing gull swoops, misses, tears into skin. I suck the wound, lap up salt, and watch the waves break.
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).