Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The previous tenant left a colander shaped like a sleeping fish, and a single chipped saucer the color of unripe plums. I keep them. They keep me, in a way I have not yet learned to name.

The window above the sink frames a slow geometry of pigeons, their bodies stitching gray to gray. Steam rises from the kettle like a sentence I will never finish.

At night the refrigerator hums its small, undeniable theology— that something must be kept cold, that something must be kept, that something.

I open the drawer and find a corkscrew, a rubber band, a key that fits no door I own. The hand that put them here is somewhere else, opening a different darkness.

I set the table for one and the room agrees to be a room. The plums on the counter are softening into honesty. Outside, a long blue dusk folds itself into pockets.