Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The kettle keeps a stranger's pitch, a whistle pitched to someone else's mornings. I learn its temper like a second language, mouth the vowels of its small complaints until the steam forgives me.

Cupboards hold the grammar of a life arranged and left: the mismatched cups, a jar of cloves gone quiet, the spoon worn thin on one slope only, proof of a wrist that stirred the same way, always.

At night the floor recites its inventory of cold. I walk it barefoot, counting the seams, and the refrigerator hums its single note the way a body keeps breathing through a house that does not know its name.

Soon I will leave the salt where I found it, return the light to its original angle, and the rooms will close behind me like a sentence read aloud once and never spoken again.