In that country, maps were made
by the people who owned the land.
They showed the roads that led to money,
and the walls that kept it in.
Nobody put a pin where they had been happy.
There was no symbol for that.

One woman kept her own.

It was not a good map.
The coastlines were soft.
The mountains were not to scale.
It showed only the places where
something had looked back at her.

It did not show the quickest way.
It showed, if you stood back from it,
a woman who had been told many times
that she did not belong anywhere,
and a scatter of small dark points
where the world had disagreed.

She did not use it to find her way.
She used it to remember that she had.