Some experiences refuse to stay neatly in the past. They surface through memory, relationships, work, fear, love, and the quiet hours when the mind has nowhere else to go. In The Maps We Make: A Poetry Collection, Cherie L. Davis gathers those experiences into poems that trace a deeply personal journey across seven movements.
The collection travels through crisis, childhood trauma, healthcare, surrender, mental health, healing, and observations about a changing society. Each poem can be read independently, while together they create an emotional map of a woman learning how to carry her history without allowing it to define every destination.
Mapping the Places Where Life Changes
The Maps We Make begins with a frightening disruption: Cherie’s husband is in the hospital with a failing heart. Tests, waiting, uncertainty, and the possibility of losing the person who has been her steady ground immediately place the collection inside an emotionally exposed moment.
From there, the poems move into childhood and painful memories involving abuse by her older brother. They also confront the family silence that followed. Cherie writes from the perspective of someone who understands that survival continues long after an event has ended. Memory can remain physical and immediate, returning through anxiety, flashbacks, depression, and sleepless nights.
That honesty gives the collection its emotional foundation. The poems don’t attempt to arrange life into a perfectly ordered narrative. Their movement reflects how memories actually behave. One experience leads unexpectedly toward another, and the past can suddenly enter the present.
This approach also gives the title considerable meaning. A map usually promises direction. Here, the map is being created while the journey is still unfolding.
Nursing, Surrender, and Different Forms of Strength
Healthcare occupies another important part of the collection. Years spent in scrubs bring Cherie into constant contact with illness, exhaustion, short staffing, vulnerable patients, and systems that frequently struggle to meet human needs.
Nursing emerges as a calling, responsibility, and form of emotional protection. Caring for other people requires strength, especially while carrying unresolved pain of one’s own. The poems recognize the compassion required to continue showing up when the work becomes physically and emotionally demanding.
The collection also explores a private dimension of Cherie’s life through consensual Dominant/submissive dynamics. Surrender becomes a deliberate choice that allows a strong-willed woman to release control and experience mental quiet. The poem “Threads of Strength” reflects this theme through a relationship shaped by vulnerability, trust, mutual support, and healing.
Its imagery presents strength as something that can be shared. Two people carrying scars can become sources of stability for each other, and allowing another person to hold emotional weight can become meaningful within a trusted relationship.
These poems broaden the collection’s examination of resilience. Strength takes several forms across its pages: caring for patients, enduring uncertainty, setting boundaries, accepting vulnerability, loving another person, and learning when to release control.
Healing Without Pretending the Darkness Disappears
The later sections move further into the uneven process of recovery. Therapy, EMDR, psilocybin, writing, boundaries, self-love, and the conscious practice of choosing joy all appear within Cherie’s evolving understanding of herself.
Healing here remains an active process. Old shadows can return. Anxiety can arrive at 3 a.m., memories can interrupt ordinary days, and depression can change how the world feels. The collection makes space for those recurring experiences while continuing to document movement forward.
Eventually, its perspective expands beyond individual history. The poems consider mass shootings, technology, screens replacing direct human contact, weakening social bonds, and the disturbing realities people encounter in contemporary life. Personal awareness becomes social observation, giving the final movement a wider field of vision.
Throughout these shifts, The Maps We Make maintains a commitment to looking directly at difficult experiences. Mature themes appear because they belong to the life being documented. The result is poetry rooted in lived moments and the emotions those moments leave behind.
About the Author
Cherie L. Davis is an author and nurse leader whose writing explores resilience, identity, healing, leadership, and the complexities of being human.
Her memoir, Through the Fire: A Journey of Trauma, Healing, and Self-Discovery, examines survival and the work of reclaiming oneself after trauma. In Ninety Seconds: What Nursing Taught Me Between Breakdowns and Bad Shifts, she draws on fifteen years in healthcare, combining humor, compassion, hard-earned wisdom, and lessons from life in scrubs.
Across her work, Cherie explores what people carry beneath the surface and how difficult experiences can eventually become sources of understanding and meaning.
A Map Still Being Drawn
The Maps We Make brings together poems about wounds, work, relationships, fear, recovery, and the world beyond the self. Its seven movements feel less like fixed destinations and more like coordinates gathered along an ongoing journey.
By allowing each poem to stand on its own while contributing to a larger story, Cherie creates a collection that acknowledges life’s disorder and its capacity for change. The map isn’t presented as finished. It keeps taking shape with every experience, every boundary, every act of care, and every choice to continue forward.