The Rain Remembers

The city forgets

how to breathe

every time it rains.

It drowns

in its own spit,

coughing up manhole ghosts

and plastic bags

that never decomposed,

only grew meaner with age.

The gutters overflow

like bad apologies

you keep making

to someone already dead.

The streets choke

on yesterday’s wrappers

and last year’s election slogans —

still soggy, still useless,

still clinging to the curb

like they’re owed another chance.

Rickshaw drivers become philosophers

with steering wheels.

This water knows where to return,

they say,

before driving straight into its mouth

like ex-lovers testing

whether the kiss still burns.

Someone lights incense

for a drowned god

whose temple is now

an aquarian apartment.

Someone else

blames the government

between gulps of cheap whiskey, 

because the rain

doesn’t fear authority,

only respects the drunk.

Children still run in it,

slapping the water into laughter,

unaware they’re wading through

the skin of everything

we couldn’t keep alive.

But the rain remembers.

It remembers names

you’ve tried to bury twice.

It does not forgive.

It just arrives —

like debt collectors,

like lovers from old dreams,

like promises whispered at midnight

and broken in daylight,

like all the things we smothered

without rites,

now clawing their way back to the surface —

plastic bags tightening at their throats,

manhole ghosts in their lungs,

wet and smiling

like they’ve finally found your address.