Atlas of Small Silences

I unroll a city of hush between my palms, streets drawn in breath and the faint grit of noon, each corner a bell that forgot its own chime. Pigeons lift like sentences not yet spoken.

In the library of dust, a mapmaker sleeps, ink on his fingertips, constellations of smudged years. He dreams in footnotes, in margins of wind that carry the scent of oranges across blank seas.

At night the porch light is a small planet, turning slow over the yard’s dark grass. Moths orbit, strict and tender, their wings the paper of a torn diary.

I mark the quiets that find me— a kettle after the boil, a neighbor’s gate, the long hinge of dawn opening. These are the routes I keep, the roads that keep me.