Nancy Scott McBride’s most recent poem to appear here was “Nature Boy” (April 2017)

Going Home
By Nancy Scott McBride

I started going back shortly after I left.
I went back and back and back again.
I’m not sure why, because when I lived there,
all I wanted to do was get away.

But maybe I was looking for something I’d lost,
or maybe I hoped to find something I never had.
Perhaps I was trying to solve the riddle of my
unstable life and unsettled mind.

Whatever the reason, it hadn’t worked and
the only thing I found were changes in the town
that rendered it unknowable.
But that didn’t stop me. Oh no.

I went back after everyone I knew had gone
and the home-place had become a parking lot.
I went back after it had disappeared entirely
into housing for faculty at the local college.

On my last attempt, I got halfway there
before turning around, convinced at last,
that the town and people I sought exist only
in dreams and the stories I tell about them.