What the Cartographer Left Out

She drew the river twice — once in winter, blue and thin as a vein, once in the dream she had the summer after, where it ran south through a city that no longer exists.

The legend does not explain what the hatching means near the edge of the known world, only that the surveyor stopped walking there.

Some rooms survive the houses they were in. You can find them by their light — the particular angle of late afternoon falling across a floor that belongs to no address.

I have been mapping the spaces between things: the pause before you said my name, the cold square left in the bed, the route the eye takes when it has nowhere left to go.