Atlas of Dust

The dome sleeps with a rusted eyelid, its copper lash catching the last rain. Inside, a lens holds the night like a marble, cool and unreachable in the hand.

Moths arrive as pale paragraphs, editing the dark with their soft insistence. They test the air, they become its pulse, their wings a shy applause for the void.

I sweep the floor and find the names we whispered into the eyepiece— constellations made of loose screws and wishes, a map that only turns when no one looks.

By morning the hill is a long exhale. Grass leans into the shadow of the building, and the sky, rinsed clean, remembers nothing except the shape of a circle closing.