The Cartographer's Last Room

She kept the maps in rolls along the wall, each one a country she had walked through once— the pencil tremors at the mountain passes, the ink grown pale where rivers changed their names.

At night the edges of the paper breathed. She heard it: a slow continent adjusting the weight of itself against its own shores, shifting the dark geometry of coasts.

By winter she had stopped labeling cities. Let the blank spaces be where cities stood. She pressed her palm to a peninsula and felt the cold shape of forgetting there.

What remains of any place we've loved— a coastline, a meridian, a guess. The rooms we charted still exist somewhere in the white margin where the legend ends.