The Grammar of Rain

The rain rewrites the sidewalk each drop a letter in a language we forgot we ever knew— salt and percussion, the vocabulary of stones.

My grandmother called it blessing. I call it the sound of doors closing in other people's houses, the wet smell of time returning.

The gutters memorize their purpose, silver scripts pooling at the edges, and I stand in the doorway learning again how to drown in silence.

There's a conversation happening between the leaves and concrete, old words breaking into new ones, meaning dissolving like sugar in a palm.