Cartography of Salt

The maps my grandmother kept were wrong in useful ways— rivers that had dried before her birth still ran in blue ink through the valleys of her palm.

She said: a river that was is still a river. The bed remembers its own weight, the way stones remember pressure.

I find her logic in the desert now, following arroyos that lead nowhere and everywhere at once, the way grief does—

not absent but rerouted, salt-white alkali tracing the ghost of what the water chose to leave behind.

At the flat horizon the light goes copper, and I think every map is an elegy for the land before your looking changed it.