Inventory for a Kitchen Drawer

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By Mira Halloran|September 2026|1 min read

An open kitchen drawer seen from above, holding string, candles, rubber bands and an old key, in warm light

One ball of string, used from both ends.
Two birthday candles, one of them lit once.
A key to a door we no longer have.
Rubber bands that have lost their faith.
A menu from a takeaway with the prices crossed out
and written in again, higher, in pencil.
Batteries we are not sure about.
A corkscrew shaped like a small man bowing.
The instructions for a kettle we threw away.
A photograph, face down, which I leave face down.

Every house has this drawer,
the one that will not close on the first try.
We say we will sort it out.
We never sort it out.

It is the only part of the kitchen
that tells the truth about us:
that we kept things just in case,
that the case never came,
that we kept them anyway.

❖

WRITTEN BY

Mira Halloran

Dublin / Marseille

Mira Halloran is a poet and translator who divides her year between Dublin and Marseille. She translates contemporary French poetry into English and writes her own work in both languages, often starting a poem in one and finishing it in the other. Her first collection, Weather for Tenants, came out from a small press in Cork. She is working on a sequence about the kitchens she has lived in, which so far runs to twenty-three poems and one recipe.

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