The Cartographer of Forgetting

She folds the coastlines where her mother used to stand, pressing shore into crease, the whole Atlantic smaller than a palm.

The streets she walked at seven have been redrawn by strangers — a bakery turned pharmacy, the elm cut to a stump still warm in summer rain.

She marks the places she has lost with small x's in red ink, cartographer of forgetting, filling in the blanks the way water fills a boot.

But here: an unmarked road that climbs through pine and rock, where she once stopped to watch a heron lift from reeds and the sky receive it whole.

Some territories resist erasure. She leaves them empty on the map, white and unnamed, the way a held breath names the silence it contains.