Inventory of a Borrowed Apartment

The kettle keeps the previous tenant's whistle, a thin geography of mineral inside it, small white country I drink from each morning.

On the windowsill, a saucer of paperclips holds the shape of someone's afternoons — their straightened ones, their bent confessions, the one twisted into a question I cannot read.

I learn the floorboards like a second language: the verb near the threshold, the long sigh under the rug, the syllable that wakes only after midnight.

Through the wall, a stranger plays the same four notes for an hour, then stops. I think of all the rooms I have practiced in, the rooms still practicing me.

Outside, the plum tree drops its work without ceremony. The light moves across the empty hook where a clock used to live, and the room, briefly, agrees to be mine.