Night Shift of the Orchard

At dawn the laundromat windows fog like greenhouse glass, shirts turn in the drums as if weather were learning to breathe, coins strike the metal throat of the machine, small moons paying rent to gravity.

An old woman folds heat into perfect rectangles, steam rising from denim like winter from a river. She hums one note that keeps widening, a thread pulled through the eye of morning.

Outside, buses kneel and lift, kneel and lift, their doors opening like accordions for the sleepless. A boy carries bread under his arm like a violin case, and every crosswalk blinks in patient amber.

By noon the glass clears; faces appear, then pass. The room smells of soap, rain, and copper. What we cannot mend we rinse, we spin, we soften, sending it back into the day warm as a held stone.