Instructions for the Fungal Metro

At midnight the sidewalks loosen their knots, rain lifts a silver seam from the asphalt, and under the bus stop bench a white thread listens through the soil.

Mycelium maps the city without maps: through bottle glass, through roots of parking-lot weeds, it reads our dropped crumbs, our grief, our gum wrappers, turning everything toward a patient grammar.

In basements, old pipes hum like cellos, steam beads on brick and slides back down, while miles below our sirens and receipts the hidden choir trades sugar for light.

By dawn, mushrooms push up at curb edges, small lanterns with rainwater in their throats; the street sweeper passes, not seeing how the ground has learned to remember us kindly.