Cartography of Moths

In the attic of summer, a small storm of wings keeps rehearsing the shape of a door. Dust rises like old vellum; light is a slow violin played with moths.

They map the air by taste, by the sugar of absence, by the hush that gathers under eaves. Each spiral is a sentence in a language that never learned to hold still.

Outside, the streetlight hums—an amber bruise— and their bodies write around it as if circling a lake that refuses to freeze, as if remembering a shoreline they never saw.

When dawn finally opens its pale ledger, they vanish into wood and shadow. Only their powder remains on the glass, a faint geography of having been.