The Glass Cartographer

She mapped the coastline of her mother's voice, drew contour lines where silences pooled between the words for bread and the words for stay. The paper soaked through before she finished.

Every shore she charted had already shifted— the harbor mouth wider by the time she turned the page, sandbars rising like second thoughts from water that had practiced forgetting all winter.

She pressed dried flowers into the legend because the flowers knew where they had been. Because a poppy from the hill above the village holds the hill the way the hill no longer can.

At last she folded the map along its oldest crease and placed it where her daughter keeps her mittens. Not to be found. To be touched on the way to somewhere else, in the cold.