A map is always a translation. Whether the old paper maps available at every gas station, unfolded in the passenger seat, or the daunting red line on waze warning you of an upcoming traffic jam — something is always lost in the act of mapping out our surroundings. Sometimes it’s a flattening of the topography, sometimes it’s the loss of color, sometimes it’s the names of the businesses. To make a map is always to decide what is important about where the viewer is, where they’re going, and how they’re going to get there.

Sometimes this act of translation is harmless. Practical instructions written on the back of an envelope about how to get to someone’s house, rivers charted in the dry earth. Sometimes it’s an act of protection: mapping out which towns are safe after sundown, which businesses are owned by safe people. Sometimes, these translations are a tool violence. Renaming what’s already been named. Erasing communities. Claiming what is already claimed, redrawing borders, districts.

What is always true is that the decision of what to keep and what to lose always flattens the reality. No map is capable of showing everything in vivid detail. Something is kept, something is lost. To map through the poetic is an attempt to understand and chart more than the physical reality of a place, but to simultaneous preserve something deeper— the emotions, lives, histories and cultures which make up the places we live, and through that process, get closer to a map that not only keeps something that’s usually lost, but understands what’s missing.