return to the city
by Adam McOmber
Strip the veils. The leather curtains. Fields of lilac. Basalt and porphyry. See the black arches. The lemon trees. The foaming river. Here is the tip of a white obelisk. Here, the notion of the “invisible view.” Remember the city, how you kissed me there in the crumbling dark, how your hand was so pale. You were gentle then. And what did you say? Did you tell me there are centuries in the past and there will always be centuries in the future? Did you lie in such a way? Remember the wood chopper, a muscular young man with dark curly hair. Once, when he was tired, we invited him into the house. We teased him. He promised things. The white peacock. The plaster trumpet. The intricacy of all reality. Remember the blackthorn plants and the thatched shepherd’s huts. Remember the past is merely an invention of the present. There was a pool full of wriggling tadpoles. And there was almost a sun. I sat on the balcony and waited for you all afternoon. Were you at the market or maybe walking in the meadow? It doesn’t matter now. There was the plowed earth. The fitful rain. And there was not one natural stone in the whole city. Everything was touched. Everything handled. And where did you go? Where did you wander? Sometimes I still dream of our house, you know—the inner windows, opening onto a large garden. No, not a garden, a whole country, a place with an inland sea. There was a fortress, wasn’t there? As if something needed protecting. And there were almond blossoms, and your voice, your cock. Candlelight on an altar. Remember when I last saw you? You stroked my neck. We laughed as if we would always be laughing. Yellow leaves. A ruin full of fig trees.
Photo of Adam McOmber
BIO: Adam McOmber is an author of four novels, The White Forest (Simon and Schuster), Jesus and John (Lethe), Hound of the Baskervilles (Lethe) and The Ghost Finders (JournalStone) as well as three collections of short fiction, Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence), My House Gathers Desires (BOA) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). My new novel, With Blood Upon His Teeth, will be published by Lethe Press in the fall of 2025. My short fiction has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Hobart. I am the co-chair of the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Director of the VCFA Postgrad Writers' Conference, and editor- in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.