Today

There is a door in the house I grew up in that I only ever saw from the hallway. Now the house is someone else's and the door is anyone's. I keep it shut the same way I keep your number.

The orchard keeps its own slow clock. Apples let go one at a time, as if the ground were asking politely. I have been trying to learn that — how to leave without announcing it.

Leaves on the tracks: the driver brakes early, the way you do around anything that used to be attached to something.

The world had happened while I slept and nobody had thought to ask.

test **test** test

I said the wrong thing in the right voice. That is the worst way to be wrong.

I don't pray, but I talk to the ceiling in the same voice, and it has never once interrupted.

Eleven strangers and one window. We all pretend the rain belongs to someone else.

Two keys, a receipt, the shape of your name worn smooth in my pocket.

You left it on the chair the way you leave a sentence, half-said, still warm, expecting me to finish it. I wore it to the market and the vendors called me by your name; I answered, which is another way of finishing it.

Every town is a handful of lights someone forgot to switch off. I count them so I won't count you. The man across the aisle sleeps with his ticket in his hand, as if the conductor might ask for proof of dreaming.

The board says DELAYED in a font that has clearly done this before.

Left at the bakery that closed. Straight past the house we didn't buy. If you reach the river you've gone too far; we never got that far.

Warm laundry. The correct change. A stranger's dog deciding you are fine. The bus, on time, going where you are.

Nothing happened, and I wrote it down so it would count.

The radiator ticks like it has news and keeps it. Frost has written on the pane in a hand I almost read. I choose the blanket over reason, once again. You'd say: get up, the day is not a debt. I'd say: the day can wait, it always has. Outside, a dog reports what it has met. Inside, the kettle rises to its gas. There is a kind of love that stays in bed and calls it thrift. There is a kind that goes to work in the dark. We were both, instead, of neither, which is how the ending shows: the tick, the frost, the dog, the kettle's steam — and you, a warmth I reach for in a dream.

The kettle and I are the only ones awake, and only one of us is boiling.