Night Orchard of Signal

The streetlights lean like patient astronomers, reading the thin script of bus windows, counting each passenger as a new constellation that flickers and drifts out of frame.

Somewhere, routers breathe under stairwells, blue as a quiet vein, and the rain rehearses a language of clicks against the metal leaves of fire escapes.

I walk with a pocket full of old passwords, stones polished by forgetting, each one a small lighthouse that refuses to say whose shore it guards.

At the corner, a bakery exhales warm light— yeast and dawn braided together— and I think of all the messages unsent, rising like bread, asking only to be held.