Some lives are remembered through dates and milestones. Others are understood through emotional landmarks, the moments that change how a person sees family, love, work, safety, and the self. In The Maps We Make, author Cherie L. Davis gathers those landmarks into a deeply personal poetry collection shaped by lived experience.
Moving through crisis, childhood trauma, nursing, relationships, surrender, mental health, healing, and observations about modern society, the collection follows the unpredictable routes a life can take. Each poem can be read independently, while the collection as a whole creates a wider portrait of someone learning how to carry the past while continuing to move forward.
A Life Traced Through Seven Movements
The Maps We Make unfolds across seven movements, beginning with a frightening medical crisis involving Cherie’s husband and his failing heart. Hospital tests, uncertainty, waiting, and the possibility of losing someone who has provided stability create an emotionally immediate starting point.
From there, the collection reaches backward into childhood. Cherie writes about sexual abuse by her older brother and the silence within the family after the truth emerged. These experiences become part of a larger examination of what trauma leaves behind, particularly when the person carrying it has spent years trying to function around wounds that were never given adequate space or acknowledgment.
The collection also enters the professional world that occupied a significant portion of Cherie’s life. Her years in scrubs bring another dimension to the poems. Nursing appears through demanding shifts, patients whose experiences stay with caregivers, staffing pressures, and frustrations with a healthcare system that can struggle to serve both patients and professionals.
There’s an intimacy to these subjects because they come from ordinary days as much as extraordinary ones. The poems emerged from experiences that happened in real time, giving the collection the feeling of a personal record created from moments that demanded to be processed.
Submission, Trust, and the Experience of Letting Go
One of the collection’s more personal themes concerns Cherie’s choice to explore submission within a consensual Dominant/submissive relationship. For a strong-willed person accustomed to carrying responsibility, surrender becomes connected with stillness, trust, devotion, and temporary freedom from relentless mental noise.
The poem Daddy captures this emotional state through the ritual of kneeling and intentionally releasing outside distractions. Its focus rests on the peace Cherie experiences when responsibility can be placed in trusted hands. Submission is presented as something deeply personal, connected with vulnerability and the experience of being accepted fully.
A Promise of Submission develops that theme through commitment. The poem speaks about emotional support, growth, mistakes, perseverance, and the decision to continue investing in a relationship. Cherie’s words reveal submission as part of a broader emotional bond built around trust and presence.
These poems add another layer to the collection’s central concern with control. Across different parts of life, control can be lost unexpectedly, sought for protection, consciously released, or gradually rebuilt.
Healing Without Pretending the Shadows Have Disappeared
The later movements turn toward the ongoing work of healing. Therapy, EMDR, psilocybin, writing, boundaries, and self-love all become points on Cherie’s evolving map.
Recovery here has an uneven rhythm. Anxiety can still arrive at 3 a.m. Flashbacks return. Depression and intrusive thoughts can disrupt moments of progress. The poems allow those realities to exist alongside joy and greater self-understanding.
That approach gives The Maps We Make much of its emotional range. Healing becomes something practiced repeatedly through choices, reflection, and the willingness to remain present with difficult feelings.
The collection eventually widens beyond personal experience. Mass shootings, technology-mediated relationships, weakening human connection, and broader social concerns enter Cherie’s field of vision. Personal awareness develops into an examination of the world around her and the difficult realities people encounter together.
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 process of reclaiming oneself after trauma. In Ninety Seconds: What Nursing Taught Me Between Breakdowns and Bad Shifts, she draws from fifteen years in healthcare, bringing together humor, compassion, experience, and reflections from life in scrubs.
Across her writing, Cherie examines what people carry beneath the surface and how painful experiences can gradually become sources of understanding and meaning.
A Map Drawn While Living
The Maps We Make gathers experiences that rarely follow a neat sequence, much like memory itself. Its poems move through fear, trauma, caregiving, intimacy, surrender, recovery, and social reflection with a personal perspective grounded in lived moments.
Together, they create a map drawn through survival and change, preserving the difficult places while making room for peace, connection, boundaries, and joy.