The Cartographer's Last Map

She draws coastlines from memory now, the harbor where her father docked his nets already dissolving into a general blue.

The legend reads: here be the houses that stood longer than the families inside them, here be the roads worn down to pale chalk.

Every river she traces runs twice— once on paper, once in the body, the one she can never fold and put away.

At the edges she writes the names of things that have no country anymore: the word for snow-light through a window in December, the smell of bread from a kitchen that was torn down.

She blows the ink dry with one long breath, rolls the whole of it shut, and sets it in the drawer with the others, each one a world she still knows how to enter.