Cartography of Grief

“More delicate than the historians’ are the                  map-makers’ colors.” — The Map

I learned coastlines from my father’s hands—
how to read where blue ends, and danger begins.
He said the secret to drawing a map is restraint:
don’t shade where the land hasn’t agreed to stay.

At first, it seemed simple—water, then not.
But the borders kept moving.
Rain reshaped the pencil. Sand retracted like breath.
Every summer the lake grew smaller,
the shore creeping in like a rumor.

I began labeling what wouldn’t sit still.
Here be houseboats, abandoned.
Here, a dock that remembers its weight.
Here, the wind’s handwriting, indecipherable but firm.
The legends filled faster than the page.

Later, I tried to map loss the same way.
You can draw the day he died,
but not the way the air leaned after.
The color for that doesn’t exist.
It’s not quite gray, not quite salt,
something between withdrawal and light.

The map hangs now in my study, unframed.
Its edges curl toward the wall,
as if it’s still folding in on itself—
a geography unwilling to be fixed.
Every so often, I take it down,
trace the lines my father once drew,
and try again to keep the water in place.

The Roofline

There’s pattern in the way a roof holds snow—
the drift uneven,
but true to the symmetry beneath.

And pattern in my thinking:
each day the mind assembles
what the world has scattered—
alphabet of birdcall,
angle of a chair pulled back
exactly one hand’s width,
footfalls counting themselves
across the same five squares.

No one taught me
how nerves arrange the weather
or why a flourescent bulb
writes in cursive.

Only that the room prefers
a clean perimeter,
no coat slung careless
over the back of a chair—
gravity has rules
and so do I.

If you call that narrow,
then narrow is the beam
that keeps the house from falling—
you step on it
every time you come home.

Listen: I know what’s missing
when the hinge doesn’t click,
when the robin doesn’t return
to the same knot in the fence.

Call it vigilance, call it excess—
but see the straight line
that steadies a roof,
the sure edge
that holds off collapse.

This is how the mind stays whole:
counting, adjusting,
measuring the load—

before any crack
becomes a break,
before the attic breathes
snow into the bed.

1. When you revise, what does your process look like—from first pass to final polish? 

One generally thinks of revision as slow and incremental, however, I tend to fuss over it until it seems right. The first pass is about maintaining the voice—the rhythm and the image--while looking for words that work against this central feeling of the piece. As with most writers, I suppose, I am never quite certain when a piece is "done."

2. What’s on your nightstand right now—anything you’re currently reading (or meaning to start)?  

On my nightstand right now is a collection of essays by James Baldwin and the recently released book of lost pieces of Harper Lee. I'm meaning to start a novel by Rachel Cusk. 

3. When you sit down to write, what’s your writing process—how do you go from idea to finished draft?   

My process starts with a single, persistent image or phrase that won't leave me alone. I write the whole thing out quickly, often in one sitting, letting the momentum carry the structure. Then I stop. The next stage is listening to the poem aloud, marking where my breath catches or where the syntax trips. The finished draft is really just the result of many small acts of listening and correction...making sure, as I wrote above, that the voice stays stubbornly. 

4. Anything else we should know - upcoming book, personal website? 

My book: Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It, a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace is forthcoming next month from CollectiveInk U.K.), I write all of my work from this learned experience as an ASD-1. My website is https://quietbrilliance.com. 

J.M.C. Kane writes with surgical precision about loss, language, and the systems we build to make sense of collapse. His work trusts readers to feel what isn't said, finding devastation in the space between observation and explanation. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It, a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace. His literary work has appeared in Beyond Words, an international magazine of the arts  He lives in New Orleans in a house filled with paintings, dogs, and stories that unfold slowly.