What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps have no word for the smell of rain arriving before it arrives — that mineral promise the body reads while the mind is elsewhere, still arguing with the afternoon.

My grandmother kept a drawer full of string. Not useful string, just string: the kind cut from parcels that never came back, soft and confused as forgetting.

There is a peninsula on no chart where the light goes when you stop looking. You can only find it by looking away — by pretending you're headed somewhere else and letting your hands go slack on the wheel.

Every cartographer lies by necessity. The margin fills with sea creatures where the surveyor grew tired and turned home, where the land refused to be land anymore and became only the word for distance.

I have drawn you this way, in the margins. Not absent — just past the edge of the page, where the ink runs thin and the shore keeps repeating itself like a name said once too often to mean anything.