Inventory of a Borrowed Apartment

The kettle keeps a small, unfinished argument with the stove — a hiss that softens each time I enter the kitchen, as if it had been speaking to someone else.

In the hallway, three coats I have never worn hang at the height of a stranger's shoulders. I touch the wool. It remembers a different weather, a colder hand.

The window faces an inner courtyard where a fig tree disagrees with the building, pushing pale fruit through wrought iron that wasn't shaped to let anything through.

At night the radiator counts in a language I am beginning to recognize — two short knocks, a pause, one long sigh, like a name being practiced before it is spoken.

I leave the bed unmade in the morning the way the previous tenant must have left it: the sheet keeping the soft topography of someone almost mine, almost here.