Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

A copper pot the previous tenant left, its bottom pocked with the constellation of someone else's dinners. I learn its weight the way a child learns a stranger's name — slowly, with one hand on the cupboard door.

The faucet stammers before it agrees. Light comes through the window in slats, laying piano keys across the linoleum, and I stand barefoot on a song I do not yet know how to play.

Salt in a jar marked Flour. Flour in a tin meant for biscuits. The labels all wrong, or perhaps right for the woman who lived here before me — her ghost still organizing the world by other rules.

I boil water for nothing in particular. Steam climbs the wall and forgets itself. Outside, a dog barks at the same hour each morning, as if marking a place where some bright, unrepeatable thing happened.

Tonight I will eat standing up, the way one eats on the first day of any new country: hungrily, without ceremony, looking out at the street as if it might explain me.