The Cartographer of Forgotten Rivers

She draws the rivers that have gone underground, tracing their old corridors through sediment and clay, the way a tongue finds the place where a tooth once was.

Her maps are full of parenthetical water, veins that only show themselves in drought when the field cracks open and exhales its thirst.

She names them after what grew along their banks: River of the Willows That Bent Their Knees, River of the Mill That Burned on a Tuesday, River of My Grandmother's Hands Rinsing Beets.

At night she dreams the water back into its channels. In the dream it moves without sound, a rumor of itself, threading through the dark like a sentence said too quietly to catch but understood.