Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The kettle keeps a stranger's whistle, a thin alto pitched to no one's morning. I have learned its complaint by heart.

In the drawer, a single chopstick leans against three forks like a tourist asking directions in the wrong language. The window holds a cactus, dust-furred, patient as a lighthouse no one tends.

I open cupboards as if reading a diary written in another hand: turmeric, a tin of anchovies, the sticky ghost of honey along the second shelf. Each jar a sentence I almost understand.

Tonight I cook with what stays — salt, the last good onion, a heel of bread softening in the bowl like a tongue trying to remember its first word.

The table is set for the season I arrived in. I eat facing the door, the way the previous tenant must have, listening for footsteps the building has long since forgotten.