I think we likely all have one of what poet Richard Foerster limns in this week’s poem, “Junk Drawer.” I love this poem’s pleasant cacophony of sounds and images and how its shape brings us into a richer, more deliciously intricate jumble the deeper we go.

Foerster has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher, and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. For the last 34 years, he has lived on the coast of southern Maine.

His new book, “With Little Light and Sometimes None at All,” was published last fall by Littoral Books.

Junk Drawer
By Richard Foerster

Last resort,
this omnium
gatherum: stuff
that’s slipped away
for unintended here-
afters, the chockablock
crypt, ramshackle home
for orphan locks, delinquent
keys, outdated scripts, a hospice
for hardening tubes of glue, pencil
stubs, pens that skip, Morse-coding
testaments to persistence, this kitchen
midden of chipped buttons, cricked nails,
dried corks and clips I doggedly scrabble through
to salvage the thing I’m certain, deeper down, is there.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Junk Drawer,” © 2023 by Richard Foerster, first appeared in 32 Poems. It appears by permission of the author.

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