Inventory of a Borrowed Apartment

The kettle keeps a stranger's whistle, a small brass complaint each morning, older than my staying here.

In the cupboard, four mismatched cups huddle like cousins at a funeral — one chipped, one painted with a fox, two simply white, simply waiting.

I have learned the floorboard that announces itself at three a.m., the way the radiator clears its throat before speaking in copper.

Someone left a postcard from Trieste slipped behind the mirror — the handwriting blue, the message half-erased by sun and the slow patience of another woman's living.

Tonight I water a fern I did not choose, and the light through the western window falls on my hands as if it knew them, as if the room had been waiting to lend itself to anyone at all.