What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps showed mountains as teeth, oceans as the breath between them. No one drew the fog that hangs in valleys or the field where my grandmother stood watching the horizon swallow her name.

She said: every place you cannot reach still exists somewhere behind the eye. The river I grew up beside kept moving after I left it — I only pretended otherwise.

There is a cartography of forgetting: the roads that end in white space, the town labeled simply Here, as if the mapmaker looked up and could not bring himself to finish.

What we leave unnamed grows larger. The unmarked creek floods in spring. The hill with no legend becomes a country. I have been drawing its borders all my life — faint pencil, erased and drawn again.