The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines last, the way water argues with land and never wins, never loses.

Her pencil knows the names of rivers that no longer reach the sea— tributaries folded into drought, into the mouths of other years.

Every map she makes is already wrong by the time the ink dries. The mountain has shifted one stone east. The village has learned a new silence.

Still she traces the roads she walked as a child, widening them where they narrowed, restoring the bakery, the linden tree, the window that held a woman's face like a coin kept too long in the palm.

What survives of a place is the wanting to return. She adds a legend: here there be the smell of rain on warm stone, the distance between one hand and another.