The Cartographer of Small Hours

She charts the hours no one else remembers— three in the morning when the radiator ticks and the street below holds only one bicycle, its rider already gone, leaving tire-marks like a question in the damp.

She draws the longitude of waiting rooms, the latitude of windows fogged by breath, marks the coastlines where sleep dissolves into the census of forgotten names: a teacher's hands, a grandmother's curtains, rain.

Here is the archive of unfinished gestures— the letter started seven times and folded, the apology that lived for years in the throat's soft geography, finding no port, no mouth, no light.

She folds the map each morning, presses it into the crease of the ordinary day. The world wakes into its noise and purpose. She carries what the clocks would rather lose.