Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The landlady left her spoons behind, each one a small tarnished moon nesting in the drawer's velvet dark.

I count them like a rosary of strangers— the slotted, the wooden, the bent silver that must have stirred someone's grief into tea.

Above the sink, a window the size of a postcard from nowhere. Light arrives in it like a guest who has forgotten my name but stays for supper anyway.

I boil water for no reason. The kettle answers in a language I am beginning to understand: the long vowel of waiting, the consonant of steam.

Tonight I will eat from her bowl, sleep beneath her ceiling fan, and learn the particular silence of a house that belongs to someone who is not coming back.