C.X. Turner

The Quietest Map

When I call his name, it comes back blurred, as if the trees are hoarding vowels. Once, love seemed like a path. Now it feels more like undergrowth, everything folding around what won’t fall away.

spore patterns
on the upturned root
fading
my hands still shape
the space he leaves

Silence settles in a hollow, wind-split log, kept where no one looks. What we bury surfaces slowly. Rain lifts our secrets, scatters them in soil, grows ivy from the ache. Bark in my hair again this morning—he lingers in the margins.

mossed-over trunk
dark where lichen clings
I soften
without meaning to
each time the light goes in

He never speaks in declarations, only in birdsong, or the way he gathers windfallen twigs. When the storm slips in, I stand still. Water finds its own way through the trees, into me.

seedcase opens
on the bracken
his voice
never actually says
what I need to hear

Somewhere past the treeline, a blackbird starts its first song again.

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About the Author

C.X. Turner lives in Warwickshire, UK. A haiku and tanka poet, she is the author of evergreen: a collection of haiku, senryu and tanka (Alba Publishing, 2024) and anemones: a mini haiku chapbook (Yavanika Press, 2023), and the co-author of Building Sandcastles: A Book of Short Poems (Literary Revelations, 2023).

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