Cartography of a Borrowed Kitchen

The landlord left a kettle the color of pond ice, a single spoon bent at the wrist, and seven mismatched cups arranged like a forgotten argument in the cupboard above the sink.

I learned the floorboards' alphabet by sound— a creak near the threshold for hello, a sigh beneath the window when the radiator clears its long brass throat.

Mornings, light spills across the tile like something the room is trying to confess. I keep the salt where someone else once kept it, the bread where my hand expects bread, the silence where the previous tenant must have wept.

Outside, the city counts its small change— buses, sparrows, the rust-orange complaint of a gate that will not learn to close. I stir my coffee with the bent spoon and feel, for the briefest moment, owned.

By evening the kettle whistles a stranger's tune and I answer in a voice almost mine, mapping the country of this temporary room, its borders soft, its weather generous, its citizenship renewable in light.