Adam McOmber
Phallic Symbols
Obelisks. Actual cocks. Oak trees. Pine trees. Most other kinds of trees. Certain tombstones, especially the tall ones. Mirrors. The way I look old now in mirrors. Large things. Small things. My neighbor when he’s mowing the lawn with his shirt off. Biographies. Autobiographies. Certain phrases. “There is nothing more to be cured in me.” Death, especially Death when he’s wearing his hood. Dream work. Milk. Fire. Almost every kind of weapon. Jimson Weed. Dracula. Maypoles. What else? Spears. The notion of antiquity. Skyscrapers. Dark vitalism. The sinister creep of life. Two sailors alone on Christmas Eve. They go to a dim-lit tavern. They sit talking, their knees almost touching. Is there something else? There might be something else. All the fantasies I had when I was sixteen. The pathology of amour. Toothpicks. Toothbrushes. Fingers, technically. Freud says all of us have two fathers—the obscene one who represents transgression and the nom-du-pere, the one who says “no.” The letters of Paul to the Corinthians. Death magic. Werewolves. Desire grows around objects that fulfill a psychological need. When I was in high school, I was in love with my best friend. He was straight. Supposedly, straight. He played soccer. One time, he put his hand over my mouth on New Year’s Eve and pretended to kiss me, but he was really just kissing the back of his hand. That sort of thing. Test tubes when you turn them upside down. Anything that emphasizes the notion of “lack.” Proto-concepts. Anxiety. Strangers. Things that are similar to strangers. Moving to a city and going to your first gay bar. The music. The way the lights are. Snakes. Bathtubs. Probably not bathtubs actually. The “fiction of the ego.” I’m afraid this conversation is going to repeat.
Adam McOmber is the author of three queer speculative novels The White Forest (Simon and Schuster), Jesus and John (Lethe) and Hound of the Baskervilles (Lethe) as well as three collections of experimental short fiction, Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence), My House Gathers Desires (BOA) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). Adam’s work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Hobart. Adam is the co-chair of the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.
