TRANSCRIPT

I’m Diannely Antigua, and this is The Slowdown.

I remember being in middle school, staring at a blank worksheet, trying to label all fifty states and their capitals. My pencil hovering over the page, second-guessing myself. Was it Missouri or Montana? Jefferson City or Boise? I’d say their names under my breath, hoping it’d spark my memory.

The map on the worksheet reminded me of playing Risk, a board game where the goal is to take over the world. You move small plastic armies across territories, marking them as your own. I never thought of it as anything more than a game. Looking back, I see how it framed the world as something we could possess, with little sense of consequence.

Maps are made by people. And people draw lines. Yet, satellite images show us that Earth has no lines. There’s nothing dividing one country from another, just mountains, rivers, and oceans tracing their own paths. These natural boundaries can be crossed, reshaped, eroded over time.

And the land doesn’t belong to anyone. We are visitors, only passing through. When we die, the land remains. Yet still, we draw lines.

These lines can separate freedom from oppression. They can decide who belongs and who doesn’t. They are invisible lines made visible by their impact. We’re taught to believe in them as the only answer.

Today’s poem questions what it means to erase borders and barriers. It imagines a world in which belonging is not something granted or denied, but something we share. It asks what it might mean to move through the world without the illusion of ownership, to see one another beyond names and borders.

Maps
by Yesenia Montilla

for Marcelo

Some maps have blue borders
like the blue of your name
or the tributary lacing of
veins running through your
father’s hands. & how the last
time I saw you, you held
me for so long I saw whole
lifetimes flooding by me
small tentacles reaching
for both our faces. I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be. Or not a world
maybe we would call it
something more intrinsic
like forgiving or something
simplistic like river or dirt.
& if I were to see you
tomorrow & everyone you
came from had disappeared
I would weep with you & drown
out any black lines that this
earth allowed us to give it—
because what is a map but
a useless prison? We are all
so lost & no naming of blank
spaces can save us. & what
is a map but the delusion of
safety? The line drawn is always
in the sand & folds on itself
before we’re done making it.
& that line, there, south of
el rio, how it dares to cover
up the bodies, as though we
would forget who died there
& for what? As if we could
forget that if you spin a globe
& stop it with your finger
you’ll land it on top of someone
living, someone who was not
expecting to be crushed by thirst—

"Maps" by Yesenia Montilla. Used by permission of the poet.