Last night the map unfolded itself
on the kitchen table
and began to confess.
It said,
I am sorry for pretending
a ruler was an instrument of truth.
I am sorry for every straight line
drawn through a river,
a village,
a grandmother's memory,
for every border measured
by men who had never smelled
the rain falling there.
I was young,
the map said.
This was clearly a lie.
I believed the cartographer
when he told me
empty space meant nobody lived there.
I let him write
TERRA NULLIUS
across somebody's garden.
I watched him rename mountains
that had answered
to older names
for ten thousand years.
Forgive me.
I called invasion exploration.
I called theft settlement.
I colored stolen countries
pink, red, blue,
as though empire were
a children's geography lesson.
I made conquest look tidy.
That may have been
my greatest crime.
Because conquest is never tidy.
It leaves bones
beneath courthouses,
languages buried
inside other languages,
grandmothers whispering names
the census refused to learn.
Then the map began trembling.
Borders loosened.
One crawled away
from the desert
and hid beneath the refrigerator.
Another reached the ocean
and dissolved.
The river laughed.
The mountains shrugged.
Birds continued committing
international crimes
without documentation.
Roots crossed six jurisdictions
before breakfast.
The map whispered,
I never understood
why humans believed me.
I am paper.
You are blood.
I am ink.
You are memory.
Someone drew a line across you
and somehow
you began calling the wound
a country.
Outside,
the earth kept rotating
without consulting
the Department of State.
Rain fell equally
on both sides
of the checkpoint.
And somewhere beneath
four centuries of renamed streets,
an older name
opened its eyes.
The map folded itself smaller,
then smaller,
until every empire
fit inside my palm.
Before disappearing,
it left one sentence
written across the table:
The land never agreed
to any of this.