Google Maps Land Color

By Grant Leuning

Color of clay, color of a sick
anglo saxon who is shut-in
its house, color of pills, of an
handful of expired anti-virus.

It makes one sick, me sick, to look at an earth
the color of this wan clay, this void clay color,
to have the world color-coded and branded,
not by cartographers in their science, another
strange way to re-make the shared earth, of
what we are only a piece, but not branded,
not coordinated, not designed by fucking
designers to be pleasing and coherent across
multiplying shit google platforms of advertisement
for fucking expired anti-virus and for cheap clay
and ads for anglo saxon hobbies like inside,
hobbies like being on in the inside of a house for
a whole unending day and not leaving and turning
fucking gray like the earth they imagine the color
of the earth to be

Change the color of the google maps land color,
to pink or land color like harder green or yellow
for pastures and corn and bean fields and black
for where the ponds and white for where the stone
shows through white or where snow is in winter
and none of this fucking unnatural alien clay
color for us or for earth

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Over a Beer and Rice Chips in Korea

I met Grant and Tina at a cheap booth in a hazy bar somewhere in South Korea. We were in the north of the country, near Incheon, the name of the particular town escapes me. The three of us were fresh into our Korean experience. We enjoyed a brief communion as writers, poets, and creatives for as soon the cheap beer stopped flowing we were on our separate ways. I made my way south to Jeju-do, Grant and Tina headed to Daegu.

For the Next Three Years

We loosely kept in touch. I stayed on top of Grant’s blog and he helped edit What We Mean back in the summer of 2012. Recently, Tina visited Chicago on a cross country bus trip and we had a chance to sit down and talk. I expressed my great admiration for the work that both Tina and Grant produce and was perhaps even too enthusiastic. Drinking on a Monday will do that. When later that same week Grant published Google Maps Land Color it seemed like fortuity.

Google Maps Land Color and Chicago Poets

Grant decries Google Map’s abominable palette as I seek to beautify it with art, music, poetry, and stories. I’m very happy to present his work in conjunction with the slow roll out of Chicago Poets. Grant’s experiments in digital humanities mark an increased pattern of writers combining technology with prose to create exciting new methods of meaning making. Be sure to check out his book of poetry, I Don’t Want to Die in the Ocean available for purchase via Paypal.