The Cartographer's Insomnia

She traces coastlines that no longer hold their shape, the estuaries redrawn each season by the patient indifference of tides. Her lamp throws a small country across the table.

Outside, the city hums its low theorem— traffic lights cycling through their faithless colors, someone's window bright with an argument already half-forgotten, still warm.

She marks a point where two rivers once converged before the dam. The confluence exists now only in old surveys and in the body's unreliable archive of water.

What she wants is a legend for the unmappable: the specific weight of a childhood afternoon, the street that no longer runs to the harbor, the name a place had before it was named.

She folds the chart along creases worn soft as skin. Outside, a bird calls once into the dark and does not repeat itself, as if once were enough to mean it.