When the Rooftops Learned to Hum

At dusk the tar and gravel soften, the city breathing out its heat like a story. From a hidden hive, a small engine of gold turns the skyline into a listening field.

The traffic thins to a river of red lights, and above it, wings stitch a loose music that hangs between antennas and laundry lines, a fine net catching the last sun.

I lean on a vent, feeling the tremor travel through brick, through bone— a hive's grammar, a code of hunger and bloom, writing itself on the air.

By night the rooftops keep their hum, a dark orchard flowering in sound. Somewhere a jar fills with amber, slow as weather, and the city forgets to be only stone.