Atrium After the Flood

Morning enters through a cracked skylight like a violin note held over water. Escalators sleep with their metal tongues out, and reeds have stitched the tile with green thread.

Carp drift where mannequins once kept winter, silver shoulders brushing the sale signs. The fountain, long bankrupt, has learned again the old arithmetic of rain.

I walk the upper level with dragonflies, past storefronts glazed in pollen and dust. My footsteps stir the ghost of perfume, then lose it to mud and cattail breath.

By dusk the building hums in one low key: frogs tuning the food court into a choir. Night lifts its black umbrella inside the glass, and stars queue quietly at every broken door.