Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

A spoon worn thin at the lip, the silver mostly an idea now, held by someone else's grandmother through years of soft eggs and cooling tea.

The kettle hums in a stranger's pitch, its whistle a half-step flat, and I learn to wait for that wrong note the way you learn the gait of a borrowed dog.

In the drawer: three rubber bands, a key to nothing, a postcard addressed to a name I cannot pronounce, the ink gone the color of weak coffee.

I cook what I know on someone else's blue flame, and the salt, when it falls, falls into hands that were not mine but will be, briefly, mine enough.

At night the refrigerator confesses in its low animal language, and I answer back from the dark hallway, a guest learning the vowels of the house.