Angélica Freitas

how to explain brazil to an extraterrestrial: your face on a flag. they’d recognize you as leader and knock you off. dirty part of the conquest. but it already happened, in another shape: aerial view of the amazon, a hundred-odd hydroelectric plants to fry your eggs in the microwave. and they’d finish you off: just part of the conquest. and what if they came to tour the waterfalls? or to be taught by the elite how to make a democracy? the spaceships cover the sky completely. all the offices and fast food joints declare an end to the working day. cockroaches and rats fled first. it’s christmas, carnival, easter, our lady of aparecida, and the final judgment all at once. lovers fuck for the last time. atms dry heave. the supermarket was a cemetery! the malls, the freeways! to explain civil unions to an iguana, to explain political alliances to a cat, to explain climate change to an aquarium turtle. it’s done, already. now, wait. eat an activia. dwell in philosophy. imagine! in our tropical country ... disastrous! not one river more. tragic! worse than locusts, your marvelous hydroelectric plants will be seen, in flames, from sirius: “my country was a sweet corn pamonha that a starving alien put in the microwave.” watch us burn: possible epitaph. Translated from the Portuguese