Cartography of Static

Between midnight and the kitchen clock, a weak radio blooms with salt and dust, like a moth learning the grammar of light. The signal leans in, breaks, returns— small ruins stitched by air.

I map the room by that whisper: window, sink, the quiet spine of the stove, all held in the hush of its tide. Outside, the streetlamps hum like beehives, honeyed with rain I cannot see.

Each station is a city I will not visit. Someone laughs in a language of tin, someone prays beneath a metronome of tires. The dial trembles— thin ice on a pond of black.

By morning, the kettle will boil, the broadcast will fold itself into daylight. But I keep the night’s cartography, its crackled borders, its half-named coast, pinned to my ribs like a paper compass.