The Cartographer's Insomnia

The mapmaker draws coastlines from memory, each inlet a sentence half-remembered, the peninsula narrowing to a name she cannot quite release.

By three in the morning the atlas opens on its own — or seems to — the pages breathing their old cedar smell, latitudes floating loose from their numbers.

She traces the valley where her father kept bees, that hum still lodged between her ribs like a key that outlasted its lock.

Every border she has drawn was a guess dressed as a line. The river moves; the city forgets the shape it wore in winter.

She folds the lamp's light back into darkness and lies down with the continents drifting through the slow current of her chest.