The Air Has Changed

The Air Has Changed Rina Garcia Chua (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photos from the aftermath of the McDougall Creek wildfire of August 2023 by Andreas Rutkauskas Click for larger view View full resolution After the wildfires, 2023 Grief sits in the bottom of my lungs—maybe I cradle it there so I can breatheevery spore, every whiff of a sliveringland and an unfurling chest—so I can say I have lived through the worstof the fires. That grief colors the duskspectral orange and this is all of us—struggling to breathe. My lungs recognize the scent of deathon a human being's shoulder. I hearit, too, before it announces its roaring downa mountain. I feel it on my nape, nighttime,when the squirrels have buried chestnutsand lost their way back to the grave. I swallowgrief from dreams— from everyone's breathas they punctuate their words with restraintthat holds back acres of burned skin. Grief skids and writhes out of my twin organsinto whatever I touch: this love, my child,songs of my ancestors in a war-torn city,this lake— innocent. I exhale to conceivespace in my body for our dying— there they areon the other side of the lake, they wait. They found their way out of this mazeof blisters. I admire the tenacity it has takenthem to look away from the burning, avertingtheir eyes and allowing grief to digesttheir bodies. Meanwhile, I stay with this friendinside me. I sing silently the songs my dadteased my mother with. I celebratethe end of this season of preciousness—where each life mattered even for a brief moment. You know what I live with.I have tasted the end on both sidesof the equator. Our chests take collectivebreaths but the sprinkling of black sootremains. There must be no pathwayout of the inevitable except to stopand breathe in this smog. These lives clinging to the back of our necks,strangling us in a chokehold— I inhale a breathto resist the collapse of a chest.Some air to run with; some lips to sing with.Some grief to sit on as we witnessthe skies plume another tornado to burn. End Page 37 Rina Garcia Chua Rina Garcia Chua (she/her/siya) is a creative and critical scholar from the Philippines who is currently based in unceded tm'xʷúlaʔxʷ (lands) of the syilx/Okanagan peoples. She is completing her poetry collection, A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards, which is a visual and poetic response to environmental injustice in migrant cultures and liminal spaces. Copyright © 2024 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma