What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named every inlet but left the fog unnamed, as though erasure were a kind of mercy.

My grandmother kept a drawer of keys that opened nothing she still owned. She never threw them out. She said: the door may come back to the key.

I have walked through cities that no longer exist in daylight, their windows still lit in some recess behind the eye, where the self stores what it cannot spend.

There is a peninsula on no chart where the things we almost said extend into the water— long, thin, trembling with the weight of the unsaid tide.

Every map is an argument about what deserves to last. I am drawing mine now, in the margins of sleep, naming the fog first.