Cartographer of Vanished Things

She drafts the coastlines no one can return to, the orchard sold, the river that changed its mind, inking ghost-roads where the asphalt used to breathe.

Her compass spins toward a north that has moved on. On the margins she pencils legends nobody will read: here, the smell of rain on a porch; here, a voice.

Each evening the paper drinks more of the lamp than it gives back, and the houses she remembers soften at their edges like sugar in a cup of tea.

Still she measures. A street is only gone until someone names its corners again— so she names them, quietly, in a hand like falling snow.

When the atlas is full she will close it like a door and the door will hold every place she could not keep, folded small, breathing, waiting to be unfolded.