Cartography of the Unbuilt

The crane sleeps with its neck of wires, orange teeth hovering over a vacant lot. Wind drafts blueprints in the dust, streets imagined as if they were rivers.

At dawn, the city practices its posture— rebar ribs, concrete breath, scaffolds like ribs of a whale. A coffee cart opens, a small furnace of light, and the pigeons argue over an empty balcony.

I walk the perimeter where fences hum with posters, faces of future shops that won't yet sell me bread. Somewhere a basement waits for a piano, its notes still packed like bricks, soft and unfinished.

By evening, shadows lay their measuring tapes, and the lot becomes a temporary lake of silence. In the dark, I can hear rooms becoming their names, each syllable poured, each doorway a held breath.