Inventory of a Closed Bakery

The sign still reads OPEN though the lock has rusted shut for a decade. Through glass, the counter holds its small museum of crumbs, a chair pulled out as if she just left.

Across the street, the barber points with his scissors. *Tuesday,* he says, *she always closed on Tuesdays.* The wind, with nothing better, turns the corner like a regular.

Yeast in the floorboards. Flour working its slow way out of the walls. A pigeon has learned the trick of the broken transom and brings its grey congregation to the ovens.

What is a town but a list of what won't reopen — the cinema, the shoe repair, the second pharmacy, the woman who knew which loaf you wanted before you said.

I press my forehead to the door and the cold answers in her language, that grammar of rising and waiting, of heat applied to soft things until they are ready to be carried home.