Cartography of Moths

In the laundry-lit kitchen, night unspools its spool, a slow thread through a cracked window. Moths map the air by touch, white commas pausing on the lampshade's heat.

They write in dust on the refrigerator's hum, each wing a soft erasure of old fingerprints. Outside, a maple flexes its black ribs; inside, the clock leaks a pale river of ticks.

I think of the roads I never learned to name, how absence can be a country with small borders. The moths enter the gap between breaths, lanterns of bone and paper, tender and blunt.

At last, they fold themselves into corners— crease of curtain, spine of a cookbook. Morning will reassign their geometry, but for now the room is a quiet atlas, and I am traced by their dim, exacting light.