Borrowed Morning

The pager with the cracked screen trembles like a cold insect.
She taps the hour she cannot afford. Legal grey, no receipt:
it pours through the hospital wristband—alertness on loan,
fizzing like tinnitus. On the bus a timetable sags under rain;
the borrowed hour arrives with an after-smell of citrus
stitched along a seam: a back stair, a child’s counting
in a language she cannot place, a door with three dents at knee-height.

She works brighter than she should. The patient with the cardigan
of blue apples tells the same joke and for once she laughs on the first try.
Hinge: the borrowed map keeps pointing: a heat behind her eyes.
She follows it on her break, shoes wet, past shutters with murals of dawn,
forward to the stair, the smell, the door she’s come to borrow /
to return / to stand before.

If she returns the hour, the joke will flatten again, the laugh
sink back into duty. If she keeps it, the child with the counting
will lose one good morning she never met. She knocks. No one answers,
and still the brightness presses from her skin like a light trying to leave.
She turns toward the ward, holding the map as if it were a warm bowl
she must not spill at the door.