Junk Drawer Residents
A reminder that ordinary world is always whispering if I willing to lean close enough to listen.
Junk Drawer Residents
My dear friend, Robin Barre, offered a writing challenge: Write a poem about what is in your junk drawer.
Here is my offering:
Junk Drawer Residents
Two long low Trader Joe’s Christmas Bark tins sit side by side
like tender keepsakes a mother saves in a box
tucked into a guest room closet,
held onto simply because they once mattered.
Their chocolate days long gone, yet they purr with saved periphery of my daily life,
small artifacts that refuse to disappear
into any tidy system of organization.
Torn corners of envelopes with return addresses I keep meaning to remember,
and thick rubber bands I cannot bring myself to send to a landfill
because earth holds enough of our forgetting.
Saved labels from teas and British biscuits and frozen wild-caught fish
that flaked so well in my instant pot
I felt a small victory bloom in my chest,
along with that nootropic mushroom blend I tried one morning
to see if a day might lift me back to twenty-eight,
that bright, unreasonable year when I was madly in love
and future followed me like a curious animal.
Three screwdrivers with different heads lie there like my three wise men,
or my three muses,
or maybe my three stooges reminding me that repair is sometimes spiritual
and sometimes comic,
and most days I don’t know which I am attempting.
Wrapped hard candies drift forward, volunteering for service:
ginger pieces, and Brach’s sour fruit kind
grandmothers once kept in purses as soft offerings
for moments when world moved too fast.
And one small journal with my Tofino beach Raven cover
holds alchemical recipes for tinctures, face creams, star waters,
and unruly energy fixes for heartache, memory loss,
and occasional longing for time travel.
All of it living inside two tin boxes
nested inside what I still call my Junk Drawer,
my sacred Black Hole,
place where what I keep becomes a kind of map.
I notice I usually open this drawer with my left hand,
and this small unremarkable gesture
makes me think of My Left Foot,
and suddenly I feel at home, complete, aligned
with something I cannot name
that has been waiting for me
to notice how I live my life
in gestures and half-remembered stories.
Maybe this is why I keep these remnants.
Because nothing in my life ever truly becomes junk,
and everything, even smallest scrap or label or forgotten candy,
remains a breadcrumb back to myself,
a reminder that ordinary world is always whispering
if I am willing to lean close enough
to listen.
written by Bren Littleton