She thought I was her sister, her mother, or her maid
when we both ended up inside.
I was Léopoldine, Anne-Sophie, and Josephine
for two minutes at a time.
The countess from the second floor called me
by different names on different days.
The elevator didn’t stop on my floor.
I had to fly one story up to reach my door.
From the window not much bigger than my eye
I saw the rooftops and the imperfections on the skin of the sky.
My room was compact with a mini-burner and a shower
that drizzled even when turned off.
I could fold my room and turn it into a suitcase
that I carried with me through the city.
I took it to my classes at a theater conservatory,
my university lectures, the Louvre’s sculpture garden,
the Marché d’Aligre, and the Seine’s left bank
where I was looking for the drowned from the past.
At night I usually brought my room back
to the nineteenth-century immeuble where I first found it.
It lay quiet in my suitcase which I pushed
into a tiny glass elevator with bronze vines
that only went up to the fifth floor.
Each evening at the top of the rickety stairs,
attached to the ceiling of the fifth floor
and built from old books by myself,
I unfolded the room and reattached it to the top floor
as if it were a missing block from a toy tower.
I made myself smaller to fit inside it,
put my fingerless gloves on, boiled a kettle of tea,
and wrote at the desk on a typewriter made of ice
while the dead, calling me outside,
tapped on the glass pane above.
Agnieszka Tworek was born in Lublin, Poland. She was educated at the University of Chicago (B.A.), Yale University (Ph.D.), and at the Université Paris Nanterre. She was also a pensionnaire étrangère at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Rattle (Poets Respond), The Shore, ONE ART, Anthropocene, Lake Effect, and in other journals.