Cartography of Rust

In the shed the abandoned tools breathe, iron bones sweating a slow orange prayer. Rain pins a new map to the door, rivers drawn in drips and silence.

I lift a hinge and its dust opens— a small weather of old mornings. The air tastes of apples left too long, and the moths spell names with their wings.

Under the window, a jar of nails holds a constellation of blunt stars. Each one points to a job that never came, a future that rusted into rest.

By dusk the light is copper and bruised; the floor remembers my steps without proof. I leave the hinge where it was, a compass that forgets how to point.