Cartography

I was raised in Kentucky
but you can trace my cells
through the crumbling infrastructures
of Ohio.
Veins as a map,
corpuscles as the ashy trees
studding rocky faces.
Where clouds
smudge the mountainside
my heart lies in repose,
clutching the moon like an old man
laying flowers on a grave.
We always imagine
there’s enough time to go back
and find the ghosts
of our grandmothers nodding over front porches,
roll our toes through the grass
our mothers once did somersaults in.
But every map is finite,
each fold creating fissures
that cannot be undone.

Amanda Crum is a writer and artist whose work can be found in publications such as Eastern Iowa Review, Blue Moon Literary and Art Review, and Barren Magazine, as well as in several anthologies. Her first chapbook of horror poetry, The Madness In Our Marrow, made the shortlist for a Bram Stoker Award nomination in 2015; her latest, Trailer Trash, will be published by Finishing Line Press in early 2019. She currently lives in a tiny town in Kentucky.