JUNK DRAWER

by Sandra Knight

A small cardboard box arrived 
In the post yesterday
My old lover sent me
the contents of a junk drawer.
It was her joke,
one I took literal-
I picked through the assorted
jumble of desultory things
in search of meaning
I found silver paper clips
in various sizes
a pale rubber band 
Neon sticky notes
put aside as useful
A gum wrapper 
Devoid of its charge
I sniffed it confirming
Her affinity for cinnamon persisted.
A marble, perhaps escaped
from a Chinese Checkers game
left to console itself
with a perfectly good set 
of disposable chopsticks,
also put aside. Then
irritation bloomed like
black ink leaked into
the bottom of the box
by a ball point pen 
thought to be dried up
Why put upon me
the responsibility of deciding 
What must be saved 
And what must go
Hadn’t we done that already?
But here it was 
a box of epithets typed 
in mysterious symbols
a pile of hurts  
drawn from the drawer 
destined to be
returned to sender 
Gingerly I picked through 
the loose bits of debris
Much as I had done 
when deciding to stay 
or to leave my comedienne 
I plucked a familiar rectangle
Worn and curled
from the discordant mess
Upon inspection the Bandaid
was intact, still good 
for a small cut or scrape
But not nearly ample enough
To cover the opening and closing
wound in my chest
I put it aside anyway

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Bio: Born in 1960 in the Ohio heartland, Sandy’s parents replaced an old straw broom with a dime store guitar around the age of ten and she’s been playing and writing music ever since. Knight, trained as a welder, served in US Navy in the 1980's when being anything other than heterosexual was a crime. Knight holds a BS in Music Therapy from Maryville University, St Louis. She lives in the Ozark Mountains with her FTM husband, a fat tabby Zeke, and their little blonde ‘flyer’ named Amelia.