What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps were honest about absence— here be nothing, the blank vellum said, and travelers understood that silence as a kind of permission.

My grandmother kept a kitchen where the walls held years of grease and smoke, where the window faced a courtyard no longer standing anywhere. She could still point to where the well was.

What gets lost in translation is not the word but the weight of it— the way certain rivers bend toward what they cannot reach, the soft argument of current against stone.

I have been drawing borders around the things I cannot name. The house I grew up in is accurate in every room except the light that came through in the afternoon.

Somewhere a surveyor is still walking the edge of a field that flooded long ago, measuring what remains with instruments calibrated for a world that held its shape.