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In China, a particular activity for each citizen to take part in every day is to do nCov tests supported by the state. We do need to pay for the tests but it is our obligation to accept the tests every day And there is a app to help us record the traveling routes. It works like a filter to help you find out whether you have been to areas with high incidence fo COVID-19.

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A cacophony of disasters, large and small:

-leaving Australia amidst its worse bushfire, to England

-Returning for two weeks of university

-Only to be locked away, in Geelong, due to Covid – connection severed to university and Melbourne both.

-Stunted education, stunted freedoms granted and then sharply removed. A collective tragedy and a personal.

-Romanticization of Melbourne, a growing hatred for Geelong.
(form of poetry and prose. a mix of both)

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I think that in remapping places from memory, the fact that the way we remember can be flawed or biased or plainly wrong is a really interesting idea. Especially when looking at 'place', considering that in most "maps" there is often only one truth (and no place for anywhere that isn't in the confines of the geographical map)

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https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-massacres

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From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire-Columbus, Rhodes, Cook-have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled. The fate of these statues-and those representing white men of a different era, in Charlottesville and elsewhere -has ignited debate about the political act of publicly memorializing historical figures responsible for atrocities. But when the statues come down, how might the atrocities themselves be publicly commemorated, rather than repressed?

In the course of her long career, the historian Lyndall Ryan has thought about little else. In the late nineties and early aughts, Ryan found herself on the front lines of what came to be known, in Australia, as the History Wars: skirmishes fought with words, source by disputed source, often in the national media. At stake was whether the evidence existed to prove-as Ryan and others had argued, and conservative historians and politicians refused to accept-that Indigenous Australians had been massacred in enormous numbers during colonization, from late in the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Even among those who grudgingly accepted that there had been widespread killings, there were still bitter, and, in some cases, ongoing, fights over the exact number of Indigenous people killed, the strength of their resistance to British settlement, and the reliability of oral versus written history. A truce has never been reached in what the Indigenous writer Alexis Wright calls Australia's entrenched "storytelling war." (In October, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the core recommendations of the government-appointed Referendum Council, which, after six months of deliberative dialogue across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, had called for establishing an Indigenous voice to Parliament, and a process of "truth-telling about our history.")

In 2005, in the midst of the public disputes over Australia's history, Ryan came across the work of the French sociologist Jacques Sémelin. After the Srebrenica massacre, in 1995, there was renewed interest from European scholars in understanding massacre as a phenomenon. Sémelin defined a massacre as the indiscriminate killing of innocent, unarmed people over a limited period of time, and he characterized massacres as being carefully planned-i.e., not done in the heat of the moment or the fog of war-and deliberately shrouded in secrecy by the systematic disposal of bodies and the intimidation of witnesses. Sémelin's typology prompted Ryan to reconsider her own earlier scholarship on the Tasmanian War, which was waged between British colonists and Aboriginal people early in the nineteenth century. This time, Ryan concluded that there were not four massacres of Indigenous people but, in fact, more than forty.

"Most historians of my generation were brought up with the idea that Aboriginal people were killed in ones or twos, similar to how settlers were killed when there'd been a dispute over stock, or women," Ryan told me recently, at an art gallery in Sydney's vibrant neighborhood of Kings Cross, where she was about to give a talk. Ryan, who is seventy-four, has short-cropped white hair and a slow, deliberate way of speaking that belies a very quick mind. She realized, once she'd started researching massacres, how many of her peers were still deeply in denial about the past. "People would say to me, 'We will never know how many massacres there were, or how many Aboriginal people were killed, so what's the point in trying to find out?' But they would never say that about World War One or Two."

Ryan is based at the Centre for the History of Violence at Newcastle University, up the coast from Sydney. A few years ago, she applied for a research grant to embark on a hugely ambitious undertaking: to map the site of every Australian colonial frontier massacre on an interactive Web site. Ryan defines a massacre, in this context, as the indiscriminate killing of six or more undefended people. Since Aboriginal communities tended to live together in camps of about twenty people, losing six or more people in one killing-a "fractal" massacre-usually led to the whole community collapsing.

Four years of painstaking research later, with the grant depleted, Ryan's map is nowhere near finished. So far, it includes more than a hundred and seventy massacres of Indigenous people in eastern Australia, as well as six recorded massacres of settlers, from the period of 1788 to 1872. She estimates that there were more than five hundred massacres of Indigenous people over all, and that massacres of settlers numbered fewer than ten. (Ryan has not yet researched any massacres of Torres Strait Islander people, who are culturally distinct from mainland Aboriginal groups but share their history of colonization.) In July, Ryan and her tiny team decided it was time to release the partially completed map online. Since its launch, the site has had more than sixty thousand visitors. Contrary to Ryan's fears, it was widely and mostly respectfully covered in the Australian media, and, at least for now, there has been no public response from conservative figures.

At the gallery in Kings Cross, the lights were turned off, and a map appeared, projected onto a large screen, showing Australia's unmistakable outline-the continent declared by the British on their arrival to be terra nullius, land considered to belong to nobody, and thus ripe for the taking. Spread across the eastern states were dozens of yellow dots, often clustered together. Each one represented the site of a massacre of Aboriginal people.

The map's data management still needs improvement-a consequence, in part, of limited funding, and also of Ryan's admitted mistake in thinking she should do all the research first, before getting input from the project's digital cartographer, Mark Brown, and digital-humanities specialist, Bill Pascoe. Even so, its power is undeniable. Ryan clicked on the yellow dot representing one of five massacres in the region of Jack Smith Lake, in eastern Victoria. On a fresh page, an aerial snapshot from ArcGIS, the geographic-information system, showed a slice of green and brown farmland and bush bordering a long, thin line of sand beside the ocean. A small square section was shaded yellow, delineating a five-kilometre radius around the site of the killings. The exact coördinates of the massacres are not identified, Ryan explained. "For many Aboriginal communities, the preference is not to pinpoint the actual site, out of respect for what is considered a taboo site of trauma. But also because sites tend to be desecrated if identified very specifically." Some sites are on private land, or mining properties; others are at the bottom of reservoirs, because so many of the massacres happened at campsites close to creeks.

On the left of the screen was a graph, cataloguing the details of this series of massacres carried out in 1843. Aboriginal Language Group: Brataualang. Aboriginal people killed: sixty (at each of the five sites). Colonists killed: zero. Weapons used: Double-barrelled Purdey. Attacker details: twenty horsemen, known as the "Highland Brigade," organized by Angus McMillan. In a box titled "Narrative," these fragments form a horrific tale. McMillan, a local settler, and his group of armed horsemen, all Scots, had, for years, been attacking Aboriginal camps with impunity. In this instance, they attacked five campsites over five days. At one camp, people jumped into the waterhole but were shot as soon as they resurfaced to breathe. One of the survivors, a young boy who'd been shot in the eye, was captured by the Brigade and forced to lead them to other camps. "Human bones have been found at each of these sites on several occasions," the text notes. "The rampage would fit the criteria of 'genocidal massacre.' "

Bruised by the History Wars, Ryan set herself strict criteria for including a massacre on the map. A key signals the strength of the evidence: three stars means that there is high-quality evidence drawn from disparate sources, while one or two stars indicates that there are only one or two reliable sources, respectively, with more corroboration welcome. Most of the evidence used for the map, she told the gathering, is from contemporaneous "white people's sources"-newspaper articles, official reports-rather than Indigenous sources, such as oral histories or social memory. (Some Aboriginal testimony is captured in those white textual sources, in the rare cases where survivors gave statements to officials or to missionaries. But Aboriginal people were for a long time prohibited from being called as witnesses in legal proceedings.) Many existing place names around the country are themselves a form of damning evidence, as the historian Ian Clark has noted in his own pioneering work on frontier massacres: Murderers Flat, Massacre Inlet, Murdering Gully, Haunted Creek, Slaughterhouse Gully.

Earlier this year, Ryan presented a draft version of the map at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, in Canberra. The feedback was largely positive, though she was advised to use a different color for the dots than red, which is considered sacred for many communities and shouldn't be associated only with death. As Ryan moves on to more recent massacres, she will increasingly draw on Aboriginal sources. She hopes the map will eventually be expanded to include massacres that aren't represented in written evidence but have been known about and passed down through memory and story by descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Since the map was released, she's heard from more than five hundred people, black and white, many from rural areas, many with details of massacres not on the map. Pascoe told me that viewers, on first seeing the map, are sometimes so overwhelmed they have to look away, but to him this is the point of mapping this kind of trauma. "People whose ancestors were involved already know what happened. But it becomes personal for everyone, because you can see what happened in a place near you, or where you grew up."

Ryan's decision to focus, for now, on archival research rather than community consultations was driven by funding and time constraints, but she also believes that white Australians who are skeptical about widespread frontier massacres need to be confronted with the gruesome truths recorded by their own ancestors-the magistrates and crown-lands commissioners, the settlers who wrote about killing sprees in their journals or correspondence. In the History Wars, she noted, the denialists figured out ways of discounting all evidence of massacre, no matter its provenance. "They'd say things like, well, you can't trust evidence from a convict, they're born liars. Same with the Native Police. Women don't tell the truth. Soldiers who weren't officers clearly didn't know what was going on." This sort of thinking would leave only sources from the two categories of whites with the most to gain from covering up massacres: the officers who gave the orders, and the male settlers who often carried them out.

Ryan is also working with historians in South Africa, Canada, and the United States to consider massacres from a comparative perspective. The same men who were brutalized by mass warfare in Europe-during the Napoleonic wars, for example-became the brutal colonizers of the new world. (Angus McMillan fled Scotland during the Highland Clearances, when Highlander tenants were forcibly removed from their land.) In the eighteen-twenties, massacres in Tasmania and Victoria were usually carried out at dawn, to give the perpetrators-who used unreliable weapons, such as muskets, which often misfired-the advantage of surprise. When more sophisticated weapons, like the repeating rifles which were first manufactured around the time of the American Civil War, spread across the globe, the nature of frontier violence changed. By the eighteen-seventies, massacres were more often done in broad daylight. The awful intimacy of the violence is another shared feature of massacre, as is the divide-and-conquer strategy of recruiting Indigenous people into Native Police forces commanded by white officers and compelled to carry out killings.

While people milled around after Ryan's talk, I spoke to Aleshia Lonsdale, a young Wiradjuri artist from the country town of Mudgee, who was showing work in the gallery. Lonsdale, who has curly red hair and a gap-toothed smile, had created an assemblage of stone tools tightly bound in cling wrap. She told me about visiting her local museum, where stone tools were massed together, and feeling as if she were in a morgue. "There was nothing saying where the tools had come from, only who had donated them to the collection-you know, 'a stone tool donated by Mrs. Brown,' " she said. Mudgee is now a tourist town, but the massacres and forced removals that occurred there almost destroyed the Aboriginal community. "It's not just something in the history book, or dots on a map, it still impacts on people today," she said. "Even in terms of Aboriginal identity, and people not knowing who they are or where they're from-sometimes that can stem back to the massacres."

I asked her what she thought of Ryan's approach. "When I first heard about the map, I went online and had a look," she said. "I told people in my community about it. Some were taken aback. They wanted to know why their massacre wasn't on there. So, for me, it was helpful to hear from Lyndall today. Because there are a lot of massacre places that the community knows about that wouldn't fit those criteria." Lonsdale paused to greet a well-wisher. "Where some of the massacres happened, in my own country, there's still a bad feeling," she said to me. "There's certain roads people won't drive along. It's not just felt by Aboriginal people but by non-Aboriginal people as well. We need a place to go, to mourn or say sorry, but Aboriginal people need to determine what form that recognition takes."

Recently, the Indigenous Australian artist Judy Watson, who lives in Brisbane, débuted a different kind of massacres map. Watson, who is fifty-eight, is a descendant of the Waanyi people, of northwest Queensland; her great-great-grandmother Rosie hid under a windbreak to survive a massacre carried out by the Native Police at Lawn Hill. Watson has been researching and making art about the massacres for decades. Earlier this year, her multimedia, research-based art work "the names of places" was shown in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra. Superimposed on the shaky, ever-moving boundaries of a map of Australia is a scrolling, alphabetized list of hundreds of massacre sites and images of other work by Watson on the same theme-such as "pale slaughter," which lists weapons used (bayonets, revolvers), and "the names of men," which lists perpetrators. Next to this video, Watson set up a touch-screen map that people could use to bring up historical documents associated with different massacres. The map is now online for anybody to explore, and visitors can share information-including "hearsay"-about massacres in their own communities.

In many Indigenous communities, art works have long had dual functions as historical sources, as repositories of cultural or spiritual knowledge, and as maps of territory. There is an established tradition of mapping massacre sites through art, as in the acclaimed paintings by the Aboriginal artists Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, and Rusty Peters, among others. Watson wanted viewers of her video to be aware that any map is a slippery, contested artifact, and also to have a bodily response to the work. She told me the story of one of her relatives, who, after viewing the video, turned to her in anguish, saying, "Where wasn't there a massacre?"

Jonathan Richards, a historian based at the University of Queensland and an expert on the history of the Native Police, worked on both Watson's and Ryan's maps. The biggest technical challenge, he told me, was matching historical data with actual G.P.S. coördinates. "I am conscious of the fact that we might identify a massacre site that nowadays is somebody's home or backyard, and they have no connection with the violence," he said. "So a little caution was crucial." The online version of Watson's map is somewhat unwieldy-again a function of limited funding, and of the enormous amount of time that both the historical and technical work of mapping requires. (She, too, has a very small team.) But, taken together, the two maps allow for "a welling up of this aspect of our shared history," as Watson put it when I spoke with her over the phone. If the funding allows, she hopes to hire a historian to travel with "the names of places" video as it tours around Australia, and meet with communities at each location to gather massacre stories. Richards told me that his research has permanently changed the way he sees the landscape. "In fact, the drive from Brisbane to Cairns these days is really, for me, just a linked pathway of brutal massacre sites."

There are about twenty, mostly very small, physical memorials to Aboriginal massacre sites across Australia, according to Genevieve Grieves, an Indigenous artist who is writing a Ph.D. on the memorialization of frontier violence. The majority, Grieves says, are community-created and landscape-based: a sculpture trail or a plaque on a single boulder, for instance. Watson and Ryan hope that their maps might act as digital memorials, which can circulate fluidly and are not as vulnerable to desecration. For, while the statues of white men have been targeted lately, the few public memorials commemorating Aboriginal history have been vandalized repeatedly for years. In Perth, there is a bronze statue of the Noongar resistance fighter Yagan, whose head was sent to England after he was killed by white settlers, in 1833. In 1997, his head was repatriated to Australia; soon after, a vandal used an angle grinder to behead the statue. It was repaired, but later beheaded again. (The 1997 beheading inspired Archie Weller to write a short story, later turned into a film, "Confessions of a Headhunter," in which two Noongar men travel across the country, taking off the heads of every bronze colonial statue they find, and finally melting them down to create a sculpture of an Aboriginal mother and her children looking out to sea at Botany Bay, where Captain Cook landed.)

One of the memorials often held up as exemplary is the Myall Creek Massacre and Memorial Site, at the top of a bluff in northern New South Wales. It was established, in 2000, after years of advocacy work by Sue Blacklock, a descendant of one of the survivors, in collaboration with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of the local community. In 1838, on the farmland visible below the hill, thirty Wirrayaraay people were massacred, and their bodies burned, in what Ryan calls an "opportunity massacre." It's an extremely unusual case: afterward, some of the white perpetrators were arrested and tried in court, and seven of them were hanged. As the site's heritage listing notes, it was "the first and last attempt by the colonial administration to use the law to control frontier conflict." This memorial, too, has been subject to vandalism: in 2005, the words "murder" and "women and children" were hammered out of the metal plaques.

Each June, a ceremony is held at the site, bringing together the descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Watson attended this year. When she told me about the experience, her voice broke with emotion. She filmed the descendants' interactions, and Greg Hooper, her technical collaborator and sound designer, put a contact microphone (similar to a stethoscope) "against one of the ancient trees that had stood witness to the events in the valley below, and captured a sound like gurgling water deep within it." School children stood at each of the plaques on the path up the hill, reading aloud. The descendant of a perpetrator got up with his grandson to speak, saying how sorry he was for what had happened. "It was like watching history slowly unravelling," Watson said. "We all take a thread and pull it, and, as it tightens, we start to see what is there."

Ceridwen Dovey is the author of the short-story collection " Only the Animals" and the novels " Blood Kin" and " In the Garden of the Fugitives."
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From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire-Columbus, Rhodes, Cook-have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled.

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https://lithub.com/joy-harjo-on-words-as-maps-and-a-poem-by-craig-santos-perez/

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The very first maps were drawn into the earth with stick or stone implements. They told us where we lived, the location of food, water, and danger. Some were star maps of the heavens, histories notched and painted, or symbols of stories that gave directions on how to live. The earliest indigenous maps of North America were not drawn. The placement and orientation of a village, its buildings, and even mound structures were markers that mirrored the meaning of the heavens, or other directional senses. Even a basket could be a map, or a song. We carry maps of destiny in our poems.

One of the earliest existing maps, known as Imago Mundi, is a cuneiform tablet of the Babylonian world estimated to be from the sixth century BCE. The map shows Babylon on the Euphrates River surrounded by other nations. What I appreciate most is the language of the text that accompanies the map. One region is described as "the winged bird ends not his flight"; another is "the light is brighter than that of sunset or stars," or "where a horned bull lives and attacks the newcomer."

When I started my term as the 23rd US poet laureate, I immediately began considering a signature project. As the first Native Nations poet laureate, I was aware that indigenous peoples of our country are often invisible or are not seen as human. Or we are known from false images and narratives carried over from the vitriol of New England Puritan Cotton Mather and others who imagined us as demonic heathens not capable of civilized and ordered thought and action. You will rarely find us in the cultural storytelling of America, and we are nearly nonexistent in the American book of poetry. For my project, I conceived the idea of mapping the United States based on the poetry of Native Nations poets. I liked the idea of mapping America by poetry with poets.

The result was a digital project published online last year through the Library of Congress, which eventually became the anthology Living Nations, Living Words. Both feature representative poets from locations across the country. Each poet chose their poem based on the theme of place and displacement, and with four touchpoints in mind: visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. They also chose where they wished to place themselves-where they currently live, in their homelands, or where they feel most rooted. In the digital project, you can see the map and the poets' locations, read their poems, and hear them recite and comment on their poems.

When editing or curating any Native Nation project the question always arises: who is indigenous? We have chosen to allow tribal nations to define who is a tribal member. It is not up to us to be the arbitrators. Many of us are established in our communities, known in languages other than English. There are those coming up who are the purl of the next wave of young indigenous poets. We are like any other living American poets who venture into the craft with the tools of knowledge and creativity to ride the waves of language, even as we also tend to our indigenous cultural systems and communities. Our common language of English, or sometimes Spanish, is a crossing place, as is poetry a common language and crossing place to meet many from all over the world. These Native Nations poets therefore become representative of a much deeper and wider field of poetry.

Maybe we are at the place where many roads come together under the dimming sun. We must make a new map, together where poetry is sung.
-Joy Harjo, 23rd US Poet Laureate
*
"Off-Island CHamorus"

My family migrated to California when I was 15 years old.
During the first day at my new high school, the homeroom
teacher asked: "Where are you from?" "The Mariana Islands,"
I answered. He replied: "I've never heard of that place.
Prove it exists." And when I stepped in front of the world map
on the wall, it transformed into a mirror: the Pacific Ocean,
like my body, was split in two and flayed to the margins. I
found Australia, then the Philippines, then Japan. I pointed
to an empty space between them and said: "I'm from this
invisible archipelago." Everyone laughed. And even though
I descend from oceanic navigators, I felt so lost, shipwrecked

on the coast of a strange continent. "Are you a citizen?"
he probed. "Yes. My island, Guam, is a U.S. territory."
We attend American schools, eat American food, listen
to American music, watch American movies and television,
play American sports, learn American history, dream
American dreams, and die in American wars. "You
speak English well," he proclaimed, "with almost no
accent." And isn't that what it means to be a diasporic
CHamoru: to feel foreign in a domestic sense.

Over the last 50 years, CHamorus have migrated to
escape the violent memories of war; to seek jobs, schools
hospitals, adventure, and love; but most of all, we've migrated
for military service, deployed and stationed to bases around
the world. According to the 2010 census, 44,000 CHamorus
live in California, 15,000 in Washington, 10,000 in Texas,
7,000 in Hawaii, and 70,000 more in every other state
and even in Puerto Rico. We are the most "geographically
dispersed" Pacific Islander population within the United
States, and off-island CHamorus now outnumber
our on-island kin, with generations having been born
away from our ancestral homelands, including my daughters.

Some of us will be able to return home for holidays, weddings,
and funerals; others won't be able to afford the expensive plane
ticket to the Western Pacific. Years and even decades might pass
between trips, and each visit will feel too short. We'll lose contact
with family and friends, and the island will continue to change
until it becomes unfamiliar to us. And isn't that, too, what it means
to be a diasporic CHamoru: to feel foreign in your own homeland.

Even after 25 years, there are still times I feel adrift, without
itinerary or destination. When I wonder: What if we stayed? What if
we return? When the undertow of these questions begins pulling
you out to sea, remember: migration flows through our blood
like the aerial roots of the banyan tree. Remember: our ancestors
taught us how to carry our culture in the canoes of our bodies.
Remember: our people, scattered like stars, form new constellations
when we gather. Remember: home is not simply a house,
village, or island; home is an archipelago of belonging.
-Craig Santos Perez
__________________________________

Introduction adapted from Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. "Off-Island CHamorus" is excerpted from Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry. Poem copyright © Craig Santos Perez 2019. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Joy Harjo on Words as Maps, and a Poem by Craig Santos Perez

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The very first maps were drawn into the earth with stick or stone implements. They told us where we lived, the location of food, water, and danger. Some were star maps of the heavens, histories notched and painted, or symbols of stories that gave directions on how to live.

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https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cofc.edu/dist/d/609/files/2014/03/The-Names.pdf

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https://placesjournal.org/article/poems-as-maps/?cn-reloaded=1

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We use maps to find our way in the world, to locate ourselves in relation to others, to measure distance and record change. Maps are inherently contextual, which can make them seem old-fashioned in a culture that values immediacy, one that operates through image and spectacle. The image is a mask, a face, a front, an arrow. The map is its opposite, not an index of the world but a way of relating to it.

This essay is a map that situates you and me in relation to the world as I know it, in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the summer of 2017, after the acquittal of the police officer who killed Philando Castile, a black man driving home from the grocery store. It is also a map to this series in Places Journal - a constellation of poems that marks a brief intermission in the usual flow of articles on buildings, cities, and landscapes.

This, too, is a map:

someone calling itself Light
has opened my inside,
i am flooded with brilliance
mother,

I was 27 years old when my mother died suddenly. She was 49. After the funeral, my youngest sister told me about a dream she had right before our mother's passing. In the dream, my sister was alone in our childhood home on the south side of Chicago, and a black bird flew around the living room, desperate to escape. Every time the bird hit the wall or ceiling, great bursts of light would appear at the points of impact. Then, my sister said, she woke up.

When I first discovered the Lucille Clifton poem, "for the bird who flew against our window one morning and broke his natural neck," I couldn't believe she had put that bird into a poem: alive and then dead. Growing up as a black girl, living with racism, sexism, and poverty, I was used to hearing the world speak through voices that were not my own. I shaped myself out of the skins of others. Reading Clifton was a shock. For the first time, I heard voices and narratives that conveyed identities and experiences I knew. Here were poems about black and brown people, birds, flight, and death. It was a legend that unlocked the map of my life.

I'm not sure whether my sister, at the time of her dream, recalled the bird we had found at auntie's house, when we were little girls. We spent the summer in a small town in southern Illinois, just east of the Mason-Dixon line. One day my cousin, my sister, and I found a brown baby bird lying in the grass outside auntie's house. It wasn't dead, it just couldn't fly, so we put the bird in a shoebox with some green leaves and dried twigs. Somehow we knew not to touch it with our bare hands. We planned to play "healing veterinarian" the next day, and we hid the box inside my cousin's bedroom closet, where we thought it would be safe. We might have pilfered a juicy pink earthworm from my uncle's bait bucket for good measure.

Here were poems about black and brown people, birds, flight, and death. It was a legend that unlocked the map of my life.

The feathered patient quickly forgotten, we went on with our summer day - hanging upside-down on the broken swing set, sucking on sour crabapples that fell to the ground, and playing hide-n-seek in the creek. My aunt fried fish for dinner, and we ate meatless spaghetti, coleslaw, and white Wonder Bread at the round kitchen table. We ate catfish with hot sauce until it was hard to breathe. We brushed our tiny teeth, bathed our prepubescent bodies, and fell asleep all together in my cousin's rainbow-lace canopy bed. The next morning we woke to the peeps of the resurrected baby bird, which had escaped the shoebox and was streaking around the house, while auntie, in her sheer green nightgown, waved the kitchen broom in the air like a mad witchdoctor.

"These got-damned girls have brought a got-damned bird into my house!" she screamed and cried. She held a Kroger paper bag in one hand and beat the broom through the curtains with the other. We girls just sat up in the bed, too afraid to move, dizzy from trying to track the swift bird with our human eyes. Eventually, auntie got the bird out of the house. I had never seen her so mad and so afraid, not even when my uncle, a coal miner, called her a fat-assed heifer for taking too long to bring him beer from the icebox. Later, auntie beat us with a switch snapped from the weeping willow in the yard. As the thin green stick whizzed and popped across the chubby caramel flesh of our exposed legs, she repeatedly commanded, like a rosary chant in time with her whips, that we never ever be stupid girls that bring fowl into the house, because a bird in the house was a sign of impending death for someone who lived there.

Now I am not necessarily saying that I believed in the bird as an omen, but I can report that my auntie emphatically did. Knowing this helps me access the place where she lived her life. Connecting these three birds - from my sister's dream, Clifton's poem, and the shoebox in the closet - I learn to read auntie's life more carefully. I gain respect for her reverence toward nature and a higher power. I understand her fierce protection of her family, her devotion to them, and her acceptance of her own mortality. I see where she is "coming from," and I can orient myself toward that place and time.

Auntie helped raise me, she loved me, she fed me, and she clothed me. Like her own children, I witnessed parts of her life that would become parts of my life, too. She was a beautiful young brown woman with two children. She had not always been sad and mean, battling bitterness, obesity, and diabetes, verbally abused daily by the oppressed husband who was her sole provider. Unfolding the map of auntie's life, I can plot its points with compassion, respect, and empathy. I get it now. For what was a bird in auntie's house but a reminder of how she, too, had once flown free, how she had been young and in love with a hopeful bow-legged black boy who carried a football across the high school field into her open heart, before they both were confined by the cumulative constructions of race, gender, class, and place that Clifton illuminated for me.

A poem becomes a map when it crosses boundaries of identity and experience, when it shows us how to move through and beyond the spaces that keep us from one another, and keep us from our own humanity. The poem as map situates readers within larger contexts: cultural, historical, social, and spatial. It layers personal and universal experiences, interior and exterior perspectives, and then it invites us to transgress them.

The poem as map situates readers within larger contexts: cultural, historical, social, and spatial. It layers personal and universal experiences.

For this series, I have chosen works by thirteen contemporary poets, including nationally celebrated writers like Claudia Rankine, Nikky Finney, Ocean Vuong, and Elizabeth Alexander, alongside some of my favorite poets from the Twin Cities and others whose words have helped me situate myself in the world. Some folks say you don't know what you don't know, and with that in mind, I have overlaid poems that build bridges between different perspectives. Bao Phi's Vietnamese woman in New Orleans, "who survived on her own for weeks by catching fish out of the muck and drying them on the windshields of half-submerged cars," can follow the directions to Evie Shockley's Carolina, "east of childhood, north of / capitol offenses, just west / of a big blue treasure chest : / wet coffin of neglected bones." Somewhere beyond Barbara Jane Reyes's "mapped cosmopolitan mudflats marshland in former lifetimes intersecting accident memory and an island named for angels," we meet Sun Yung Shin's speaker, who escapes "Down into the ocean, through story after story of water, darker as I became heavy as lead."

Most of the poems in this series can be read as poems of resistance. They are relief maps that accentuate uneven terrain. They reveal ridges and hollows that are invisible on the standard road maps drawn by cartographers working within dominant systems and institutions, the maps that silence most voices and narratives. These poems also loop back through time to juxtapose a past with a present, and then break through into a new plane. I am interested in poems that trace the experiences of people on the margins, the people in between the lines, and then write them into a place of change and transformation.

Poems as maps help readers survey their selves and experiences. A poem can answer the questions that matter: "What happened, how did this happen, what else was happening when this happened, who did it happen to, how can I understand it, why does it matter, how will I make it out of this, how can we change this, what is my part in this, how is it aesthetically beautiful and valuable."

As you read these poems, and as you locate your position among them, heed the wisdom of poet and birder J. Drew Lanham:

unfurl the map
aim the compass well
cause true north does lie
dead reckon instead on reality
find yourself there

Your support makes our work possible.

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Poems as Maps: A Series on Places Journal

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We use maps to find our way in the world, to locate ourselves in relation to others, to measure distance and record change. Maps are inherently contextual, which can make them seem old-fashioned in a culture that values immediacy, one that operates through image and spectacle.

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Short poem (20-40 lines give or take) set in Croydon (and framed by the pandemic):

relocation from the states, tenuousness of sense of home, friends and immediate family all overseas

what makes Croydon a suburb of Melbourne specifically and distinguishes it from other suburbs of other cities? what physical and intimate details (preferably within 5km of home) are Croydon-specific?

formal constraints? e.g. elegy, free verse, etc.

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https://citiesandmemory.com/sound-map/

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Cities & Memory | Field Recordings, Sound Map, Sound Art

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Sound map technology built by Tim Waterfield.

This sound map is part of Cities and Memory is a global field recording & sound art work that presents both the present reality of a place and an alternative, reimagined sound world - remixing the world, one sound at at time.

As well as browsing the sound map above, you can subscribe to the latest Cities and Memory sounds via:
Latest sounds:

"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of [the city] as it is today should contain all [the city's] past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."

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Sound map of the world and field recordings by Cities and Memory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sound map technology built by Tim Waterfield. This sound map is part of Cities and Memory is a global field recording & sound art work that presents both the present reality of a place and an alternative, reimagined sound world - remixing the world, one sound at at time.

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https://maps.tnc.org/migrations-in-motion/#4/19.00/-78.00

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Migrations in Motion - The Nature Conservancy

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Data visualization showing projected direction 2900 species need to move to track climate change

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In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried in a mitten, represent coastlines in a continuous line, up one side of the wood and down the other. The maps are compact, buoyant, and can be read in the dark.

These three wooden maps show the journey from Sermiligaaq to Kangertittivatsiaq, on Greenland’s East Coast.

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https://www.indigenousmaps.com/indigenous-mapping-collective/

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The Indigenous Mapping Collective was designed with the idea of taking geospatial capacity building to the next level. The Indigenous Mapping Collective is a virtual platform that allows Indigenous mappers to connect with each other and have premier access to mapping resources and at all times. For the first time ever, you can revisit IMW at your own pace.

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Indigenous Mapping Collective - Indigenous Mapping Collective

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Indigenous Mapping Collective was designed with the idea of taking geospatial capacity building to the next level. The Indigenous Mapping Collective is a virtual platform that allows Indigenous mappers to connect with each other and have premier access to mapping resources and at all times.

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* thinking about how often I had to be confronted with my image in a mirror during lockdown - noticing the new textures that emerged (e.g. new stretch marks from weight gain, etc.)
- is there a connection between the unique landscape of our bodies and the physical spaces we inhabit? How did lockdown re-frame how we exist in these landscapes?

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I love the idea that a map can be used as a tool to get lost; an idea that's relevant to my paintings too. As a second part to the above mentioned workshop, the drawings were cut into sections, and small groups went out to discover the local neighbourhood in relation to their chosen section of map. Each group chose a part of the drawing they wish to discover in 'real life', and set out to navigate the streets based on the lines in the drawing.

The exercise encourages participants to not be guided by pre-existing knowledge of how to get somewhere, or to follow an obvious route, but rather to see the map as a score to guide their movements. The drawing encourages explorers to look for details in the landscape that they might not otherwise have seen, and to encourage them to stop in places that they might not normally stop.

A certain amount of interpretation is necessary for this task. Scale and proportion may need to be warped, the map might flicker between aerial view and street view, and some lines or marks could be interpreted as instructions for how to move rather than indicating what is there.

Once a designated spot is located, the idea is to reflect on the place that you happen to find yourself in.

What do you see, and how do you feel?

Do you know anything about this place?

Do you have they had any personal experience here?

What do you imagine was here before?

What do you wish or hope might be here in the future?

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I love the idea that a map can be used as a tool to get lost; an idea that's relevant to my paintings too. As a second part to the above mentioned workshop, the drawings were cut into sections, and small groups went out to discover the local neighbourhood in relation to their chosen section of map.

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Watch as a large-scale, interactive augmented reality child, the Child of Now, ages from the age 0 to 100 years over an epic 10-day performance.
Represented as a 100-metre-high virtual being residing atop of Hamer Hall, Child of Now will be visible on digital screens and mobile devices, in a mammoth undertaking, which is already in its first stage of its development.

Conceived by Artist Robert Walton and co-written by First Nations Author and Activist Claire G. Coleman, the Arts Centre Melbourne and University of Melbourne partnered work is an interdisciplinary collision of arts and computer science.

Across each of the 10 days, the Child of Now will live a 'normal' day - walking, playing, communicating, interacting and dreaming across each 24-hour cycle.

On the tenth day, the Child of Now will be 100 and will go to sleep for a final time at a candle-lit vigil attended by thousands of visitors and watched online by thousands more around the world.

"We are thrilled to partner with the University of Melbourne to bring this project to life," Arts Centre Melbourne's CEO Claire Spencer AM says.

"Projects of this scale and ambition appear once in a decade and require the support and expertise of our city's cultural and educational institutions to be realised."
An artist impression of 'Child of Now'
Representing the number of minutes in the 10 days, 14,400 people from Melbourne's wonderfully diverse population will collectively set the vision for a more equitable, sustainable, peaceful and inclusive future for the Child of Now.

Currently the team, led by Walton, is working to create a series of giant virtual holograms and the artificial intelligence technology required to animate them.

"The aim of this project is to create a rare and extraordinary moment in the life of Victoria for people to consciously empathise with future generations who will inherit our culture, customs and built environment and face the challenges of climate chaos caused by generations living now," says Walton.

"By following the life of an imagined child born in 2021, made up of the contributed faces, dreams and gestures of the current population, it becomes possible to rehearse our future in an invested, emotional, hopeful and human way."

In 2022, a prototype of Child of Now will inhabit Arts Centre Melbourne over a weekend - inviting the first public contributions to the project as the part of the work's next stage of development.

For the first time, audience members will have the opportunity to become the Child of Now via a volumetric 3D body scan and Virtual Reality experience.

"This way of working with an Artist in Residence has led to a distinctive collaboration which extends the University's capacity to effect change at the forefront of creative practice in technology, art and entertainment," said Professor Frank Vetere, Deputy Dean of Engagement, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne.

It is envisioned that the completed work will take up residence on the Hamer Hall rooftop for 10 days in 2024.

The Child of Now prototype has been co-commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne and the University of Melbourne.

The feasibility study for the Child of Now was supported by Arts Centre Melbourne, Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and the University of Melbourne.

For more information visit www.robertwalton.net/project/child-of-now
Creative Producer Julianne Pierce, Technical Artist Phoria, Environment Design Anna Tregloan, Audio Design Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, Production Manager Richard Gorr, volumetric capture system by Dr Andrew Irlitti, Professor Frank Vetere, and Associate Professor Thuong Hoang. Executive Producer Arts Centre Melbourne with support from the University of Melbourne.

The voice of I-ME performed by Uncle Jack Charles and Tahlee Fereday.

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Watch as a large-scale, interactive augmented reality child, the Child of Now, ages from the age 0 to 100 years over an epic 10-day performance. Represented as a 100-metre-high virtual being residing atop of Hamer Hall, Child of Now will be visible on digital screens and mobile devices, in a mammoth undertaking, which is already in its first stage of its development.