Today's poem is Culch by Sonja Johanson. It is read by Julia Bouwsma.
Culch
You can tell who grew up here by whether
there's a culch drawer somewhere in their kitchen.
I knew one family used a teapot for
their culch. The contents, when I dumped them out,
included a barrette, a silver bell,
three flat-end screws and five with points, two dimes,
a fancy magnet, several allen wrenches,
ten pennies stuck together, a gold earring
with what looked like an opal, no backing,
some p-tex sticks, a tube of super glue.
Some houses have whole rooms that they devote
to culch—stacks of National Geographics,
bolts of unused fabric, lamps that they intend
to have rewired, chairs that have those wobbly
slats they mean to fix. Some houses have entire
barns are full of culch—cars that need repair,
half a cord of punky wood, filing cabinets,
a hand-crank washer and a frozen mangle.
It isn't junk. A culch drawer's not a junk
drawer. We've used the word so long the origin
is lost to everyday, we have to look up what it meant.
Culch is the mess of stones and broken shells
on which the larval oysters settle when
they turn to spat. Culch is grit repurposed
because everything we have is needful.
Culch is what you keep to not be wasteful,
culch is knowing nothing should be thrown away.