Mycelium Under the Parking Lot

At dawn the parking lot steams like bread. Oil rainbows loosen on last night's puddles. Beneath the white arrows and shopping carts, a pale republic of roots keeps speaking.

Mycelium threads the dark like handwriting, looping around bottle caps, old receipts, lifting rumors from rusted nails and passing them mouth to mouth in silence.

Above, we trade coins, names, appointments; below, the fungi count in lightning pulses. Every cracked slab is a listening window, every weed a green antenna.

When evening shutters the storefront glass, the ground exhales its wet, mineral music. I stand still long enough to hear it: the city dreaming in underground bloom.