What the Margins Said

I remembered the atlas

after the car turned the corner.

That's the timing. That's always the timing.

Ten years, it rode in the back seat,

spine cracked at Kentucky

from being unfolded too fast once,

someone laughing, someone saying

just use the screen

and me spreading it out anyway

across the steering wheel.

The stranger got it with the car.

The handwriting in the margins.

A circled town in eastern Ohio

I've never been to,

and underneath:

good diner, ask for the booth,

which booth unspecified,

which is so like her

I almost called to say

you left something in my car

except it wasn't my car anymore

and it wasn't her car

and the gas station she'd written below

closed sometime in 2016,

which I know because I looked it up

later that night

sitting on the front step

where the car used to be.