Title taken from the Weekly World News
After long searching, years of dusty rooms and dank basements, finally!
Oprah’s Attic, of course: another name for heaven. Emptied of plagues,
the box itself rests on top of a stack of moldy records, board games,
spiritual, self-help, and craft books: Knit Your Own
God’s-Eye or How to Decoupage
A Shredded Soul.
A barren void barely humming,
the box snaps shut like a sister cigar box, similarly redolent
of its former contents: dark, musty, sweet smell
of doom. Of many dooms. You get a doom!
lo
You get a doom! We still have time, I tell myself
and anyone who still cares to listen.
Where do we start our quest?
Open the door to the staircase, step down from these heights.
One foot, the other. Heft the box into backpack or bindle, and
wander out to scavenge. I let the dogs out; I will
gather them back to their darkness.
Courtney Bambrick teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia. She was poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories until 2024. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Landlocked, Clockhouse, Pinhole, Thimble, SWWIM Everyday, New York Quarterly, Invisible City, Healing Verse: Philly Poetry Line and more. Her chapbook Rape Baby, a runner up in the 2013 Pavement Saw competition, was published as “Caring for Your Rape” at The Fanzine. Her chapbook Gargoyle was a semifinalist in Iron Horse Literary Review’s competition. Her chapbook World Without is now available from Bottlecap Press.
