Inventory of a Vacant Lot

Between the laundromat and the boarded pharmacy, a rectangle of dirt remembers a building the way a tongue remembers a missing tooth— worrying the absence, finding only air.

Chicory has moved in, blue and unbothered, and a shopping cart lies on its side like a deer that gave up halfway through the field. Children have left a bottle cap, a shoelace, the wrapper of something sweet.

In August the asphalt rim softens at noon and prints the soles of anyone passing through. A man stops to light a cigarette, exhales, keeps walking. The smoke loiters longer than he does, threading itself through the chain link.

What was here before is not coming back. What is here now is rain on broken concrete, a sparrow drinking from a tire's small lake, the slow, indifferent arithmetic of weeds adding themselves to the abandoned ledger.