Atlas of Small Weather

In the alley a laundromat hums its low gospel, shirts turning like slow planets in a blue orbit, steam lifting from their collars—brief altitudes where someone’s perfume becomes the sky.

A bus exhales, windows fogged with shy weather, faces inside draw maps in the mist, forgetting the river that used to curve here, and the wet iron smell of factories that never learned to sleep.

I carry a paper cup of rain, sipping the gray, each swallow a tiny storm passing through my ribs; the streetlights begin their amber rosary, counting the beads of traffic, each bead a pulse.

Night folds its tarp over the rooftops and antennas, a tar-paper sea with chimneys like buoys; somewhere a cat rehearses its soft thunder, and the city keeps learning the language of drizzle.