What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named every inlet but not the cold that lived there, not the way the water held the color of pewter long after the storm had moved inland.

My grandmother folded a river into a crease she never ironed out. It ran through the center of every conversation, unnamed, necessary as breath.

There are territories that resist the grid— the hour between sleeping and waking when the body forgets its edges, when the ceiling becomes sky again and you are briefly no one's child.

I have drawn the house from memory three times now, and each time a window moves, a staircase shrugs off its banister. The house is not lying. I am.

What we cannot map we carry instead: weight distributed without knowing, the unnamed inlet salting everything, the river folded still, running.