Platform for Wild Fennel

At the last platform, ivy learns the timetable by heart. Dust hangs in the tunnels like flour before bread. Someone has planted fennel in a cracked ticket machine, and every morning its green feathers comb the dark.

Rusted rails hold rain the way old violins hold songs. Light falls through street grates in thin brass bars, striking puddles, waking minnows of silver wrappers that drift and turn as if hearing a conductor.

I come here with a thermos, a notebook, no destination. The city above thunders its errands and sirens, but below, roots stitch brick to brick with quiet thread, teaching concrete the slow grammar of spring.

By noon the station smells of anise and wet stone. A train that no longer exists arrives as wind, lifts my pages, scatters seeds across the platform, and leaves me holding one bright stem like a candle.