Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The landlord left a copper pot hanging from a nail bent like a question, and a single fork, tines fanned as if it had been listening for years.

I find salt in a jar marked *flour*, and flour in nothing at all — just the ghost of it, a white breath across the cutting board, the shape of someone else's afternoon.

The window faces a brick wall the color of an old recipe, and at certain hours the light arrives softened, secondhand, the way news travels through a long hallway of cousins.

I boil water for no reason. The kettle, dented, sings off-key, and the rooms around it lean in as if something here belonged to me — as if borrowing were a kind of keeping.