Murmuration Over the Rail Yard

At dusk the freight tracks turn to black water, and the crows lift out of the signal tower like handfuls of burnt paper finding, all at once, a single grammar.

Wind combs the iron weeds beside the fence; rusted cars hold the day’s last heat, a faint red pulse behind their ribbed doors, as if the metal remembered summer by touch.

Above the yard, the flock writes and erases itself, a moving bruise, a lantern, a torn sleeve of smoke. I stand with my hands in my pockets, hearing their wings stitch the dark together.

When they vanish, the sky does not close. It keeps their shape for a breath, then another, and the first star appears where they were, small as a nail, bright as a promise kept.