Inventory of a Rented Room

The kettle keeps a private weather, its small storm rising at six, exhaling the ghost of someone who used to wait for it.

A chair the color of old letters. A window that opens onto another window. On the sill, a coin from a country I have never been able to spend.

The radiator speaks in Morse to the radiator above, and I, between them, am the silence both are translating around.

I have learned the floorboards the way a tongue learns a sore tooth— each creak a syllable of the previous tenant's leaving.

At night the lamp draws its yellow circle and I step inside it the way one steps into a boat that is not quite seaworthy, not quite shore.