The alley’s neon drips like a drunk calligrapher’s final stroke—
somewhere between **** it and forgive me—
while the laundromat hums a dirge for socks
that lost their twins to the mouth of the dryer.
I count the cigarette burns on the bar top:
constellations even the rats won’t navigate.

Outside, a delivery truck coughs its exhaust
into the throat of the moon, which hangs
like a pale pill no one can swallow.
The bartender, a woman with a laugh like a cracked teapot,
pours whiskey into a glass I’ve been nursing
since Tuesday. It tastes of burnt orchards.

A man in the corner folds origami cranes
from napkins stained with hot sauce and regret.
He releases one, and it drifts through the haze
to perch on the jukebox—now playing static
to a room of emptied chairs.
Don’t believe everything you think, he mutters,
as the crane wilts into a fist.

Rain stitches the streetlights into a river.
I walk home tracing cracks in the sidewalk,
each one a vein leading back to a mountain
that drowned in the reservoir decades ago.
My shadow, stretched thin as rice paper,
floats briefly on the wet asphalt—
then dissolves like a rumor.

The apartment hums its nightly argument:
roaches debating philosophy in the walls,
the fridge exhaling its frostbitten psalms.
I peel an orange, watch its segments
curl into tiny, bitter suns.
Somewhere, a train howls.
Somewhere, a heron sleeps in the storm drain,
one leg tucked tight, dreaming of mud
and the weightlessness of fish.

Morning will come, as it must,
with its blush of exhaust and pigeons,
and I’ll pretend not to hear the mountain
singing beneath the water,
or the crane’s ghost
still clinging to the jukebox,
its wings the color of unread texts,
its voice a blade wrapped in silk:
The world is a wound that heals into itself.

The whiskey’s gone.
The rain’s gone.
Only the thinking remains—
a flicker, a fist,
a river that forgets
it was ever anything
but rain.