Atrium After Rain

The old mall opens its glass ribs at dawn, a cathedral of escalators gone still, where rainwater gathers in tiled hollows and carries the sky in trembling squares.

Ferns lift their green tongues through cracked grout, soft as breath on a sleeping shoulder; a swallowed storefront glows with moss, and mannequins wear dust like winter lace.

A blackbird lands on the food court fountain, drinks from a coin-bright pool of weather, then throws one silver note into the rafters that keeps ringing after it has flown.

I walk the corridor of shuttered names and feel the building remember itself: not commerce, not neon, but weather and root, a slow returning to the grammar of rain.