Cartography of the Wrist

The blue vein runs like a river no one has named yet, branching toward fingers that remember piano keys, a dog's wet ear, your mother's sleeve.

Somewhere in the crook of it, a pulse that started before language, before the word for fear— still counting its own measure.

Old cartographers drew sea monsters where the map ran out. The skin here too has its terrors: the thin place where cold arrives first, where the needle goes in.

To read a wrist is to read a whole history of holding on— the scar from the rusted gate at seven, the tan line that remembers summer, the blue thread that simply keeps going.