Inventory of a Vacant Lot

Between the dollar store and the freeway, a square of weeds keeps its own counsel: chicory blue as a forgotten phone number, the rusted spine of a shopping cart half-swallowed by Queen Anne's lace.

Someone left a chair here. Someone always does. Vinyl split like a fruit, foam blooming into the slow architecture of rain. A pigeon weighs the armrest, decides against it, lifts off toward the warmer math of dumpsters.

The lot remembers being a butcher shop, remembers being a laundromat, remembers the night the laundromat burned and how the firemen stood in the parking lot drinking from paper cups, saying nothing.

Now it is only this: a held breath of milkweed, a hubcap catching the late light like a coin tossed up and never coming down, the city forgetting itself in small green increments.

At dusk, a fox the color of brick trots the diagonal, unhurried, inheriting what was always hers.