Mall Atrium with Ferns

In the abandoned mall, spring rehearses in glass, rain taps the skylight like a patient stage manager, escalators hold their metal tongues in the dark, and a fig root worries the seam of a food court tile.

Moss lifts its green lanterns around the fountain basin, coins gone black under a skin of patient water; a mannequin's wrist, pearled with dust, points nowhere, which is close to prayer.

From the cracked ceiling, daylight hangs in strips, soft as laundry in a country no map remembers. Vines test the railings, learn the curves, write slow cursive over SALE and EXIT.

By evening the whole place smells of leaf and plaster, of wet concrete opening like bread. Somewhere a bird keeps practicing one silver note, until the empty stores begin to sound inhabited.