Cartography of Salt

The old maps mark rivers by their sound— a wavy line for anything that moves, a name that means nothing to the water itself.

My grandmother drew our house this way: pressed a thumbnail into wet clay and said, here is the window where the light lands first.

Now I carry that indent the way the shore carries the shape of a retreating wave— briefly, with great accuracy.

Some places only exist in the body. You walk into a room smelling of cedar and your hands remember a door the building no longer has.

I am learning to read the marks left by things that no longer touch me. Every scar, a legend. Every silence, a scale.