Rooftop Greenhouse, 3 A.M.

On the hospital roof, the greenhouse keeps a second dawn, humid and green as a held breath behind glass. Tomatoes glow like small red planets in IV light, and basil lifts its wrists to the humming vents.

Below, elevators swallow and release their constellations, gurney wheels write quick silver runes in hallways. Up here I mist the leaves, slow rain from a plastic moon, watching each droplet learn the shape of a vein.

At three a.m. the city is a listening animal, its windows half-closed eyes, its sirens far-off gulls. Seedlings lean toward the emergency sign’s amber pulse, as if urgency itself were a kind of sun.

By shift’s end, the east unbuttons a pale seam. I carry down mint on my sleeves, soil under my nails, and the day nurses smile, inhaling the evidence: somewhere above the grief, something kept growing.