What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

She drew the coastline from memory, her hand tracing what the tide had already unmade— a peninsula that no longer reaches into the sea.

The legend shows symbols for marshland, for ruins, but nothing for the sound a room makes after someone has just left it.

She marks a forest where a forest stood, labels a mountain by its old name, the one the mountain does not answer to anymore.

Every map is a record of what we refused to let go: roads we insisted on calling roads long after the ground beneath them turned to field.

In the corner, in the margin, she wrote the word for a place she could only describe by describing the shape of its absence.