Cartography of a Wick

I light a candle and the room becomes a shoreline, walls retreating like slow water pulling back. The flame is a small surveyor tracing the edges of my hands.

Its heat writes continents on my knuckles, ash as an archipelago of what I held. A moth is a paper boat in the draft, learning the cost of compass points.

I follow the wick as if it were a road, each braid a street in a city I never built. The wax pools, a harbor for lost names, reflecting a sky with no weather.

When the light thins to a grain of salt, I fold the map and put it in my mouth. Even darkness has a scent then— char, and the quiet of arrivals.