Cartography of a Borrowed Coat

In the left pocket, a tram ticket folded into the shape of a small bird, the date worn soft as river-stone, some Tuesday I will never visit.

The lining keeps a perfume that does not belong to my mother or to me — a third woman, neither of us, who walked through rain in 1987 and never stopped walking.

A button hangs by a single thread, the way a sentence hangs before its final word arrives. I do not sew it. I leave the almost-falling where it teaches me patience.

When I wear the coat to the market, strangers nod at me as if I am someone they used to know. I nod back. We agree on this lie of recognition, this brief kindness of mistaken country.

At night I hang it by the door, and the shoulders hold their shape without me — a body of wool and absence, still listening for the weather of a city I have never seen.