Rooftop Greenhouse at 3 A.M.

The city loosens its metal jaw after midnight, and up here glass rooms breathe like sleeping lungs. Tomato vines climb twine with patient knuckles, while rain rehearses scales across the panes.

I mist the basil; the air turns green and peppered, a small weather made by my own wrist. Streetlights pool below like dropped coins, and buses sigh through avenues no one names aloud.

A moth arrives, pale as a torn receipt, circling the heat lamp as if orbit could be prayer. In each leaf vein, water keeps translating darkness into a language the morning will call color.

When dawn finally lifts its thin blue curtain, skylines sharpen, cranes wake, windows ignite. I carry down one crate of strawberries, hands smelling of earth no map remembers.