Inventory of a Vacant Lot

Between the laundromat and the closed pharmacy, a rectangle of weeds keeps its own ledger: chicory, plantain, the blue persistence of cornflower pushing through asphalt seams like a slow answer to a question nobody remembers asking.

A grocery cart leans in the corner, cathedral of rust, its wire ribs hung with plastic bags that flag the wind in three languages of white. Someone has left a child's pink sandal here, its buckle still bright, waiting like a doorbell.

In August the lot smells of hot tar and fennel. Bees do their bookkeeping in the goldenrod. A man crosses the diagonal each morning at six, shortcut to the bus, his shoes printing a thin path that the rain keeps trying to erase.

What was demolished here, no one says. The brick dust has long since become soil, become root, become the small yellow flowers that nobody planted, that nobody owns, that close at dusk like wallets emptied of light.