Inventory of a Rented Room

The kettle remembers a different hand. Its whistle still leans toward someone who left the key under a stone two tenants ago, three winters back.

I catalog what the walls have kept— a nail without its picture, the ghost-rectangle of a bed that faced north for reasons no one wrote down, a smell of cardamom in the second drawer.

At night the radiator speaks in the bruised language of plumbing, confessing to pipes I cannot see. I answer in the only dialect I know: the slow vowels of unpacking.

Outside, the city practices its scales. A dog the color of wet paper crosses the courtyard like a thought I almost had, then lost to the hush of the elevator climbing.

Home, I'm learning, is not a room but the way a room forgets you back, generous, impartial, already humming the next tenant's name into the plaster.