The Maps We Make

The Maps We Make is a poetry collection by Cherie L. Davis that traces one woman's life in seven movements.

It begins in the hospital with her husband's failing heart-the tests, the waiting, the sudden knowledge that the man who has been her steady ground could be taken. From there it moves backward into the childhood rooms where her older brother stole her innocence and the family met the truth with silence. The poems hold the weight of that silence and the long work of surviving it.

The middle sections turn to the years spent in scrubs. Nursing becomes both calling and armor: the short-staffed shifts, the patients who break her heart, the system that keeps failing the people it claims to serve, and the daily choice to keep showing up. Running alongside that public strength is a private one-the deliberate decision to kneel, to give control to a Dominant who can hold what she cannot, and the unexpected freedom and mental quiet that arrives when a strong-willed woman finally lets go.

The later poems chart the uneven work of healing: therapy, EMDR, psilocybin, the slow practice of staying with herself, and the hard-won ability to choose joy, boundaries, and self-love without denying the dark. Even after progress, the old shadows return-anxiety at 3 a.m., flashbacks, depression, the mind that will not shut up. The final section widens the lens to the larger world: mass shootings, screens that replace human contact, the fraying of social bonds, and the stubborn decision to keep looking clearly anyway.

Every poem stands alone. Together they form a single map-drawn in real time through crisis, trauma, service, surrender, resilience, and the refusal to look away.