“The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic.”
………………………………………………………………………-Adam Phillips

Duskless days of cloud-smoke and heat lightning.

Bitter tincture, citrus and ice, the urge
to put the moonstone in my mouth. All this equals

the moth in the closet that eats its fill of wool coats
and yet is never seen. Soft-winged, tawny, phototaxic—
that is, drawn to light—though for reasons unknown.

Equals all that was accidentally, and intensely, lost.
Collecting at the needle’s tip—
needless, wanting you.

You, who claimed I only found it cinematic.
Well, here it is again: desire’s untidy cameo,
B-movie femme fatale, who always dies

and whose death is always a warning.
The body that hits itself, over and over, against the bulb.
The sleep that flees me the more I pursue it.

Writing equals the same poem, over and over. Here we are again.
Inside the shell of night, in dreams, in this vacation-hour,
breeze-lapped and blue. The one where you always come back.

Allison Geller is a New York-based writer currently at work on a debut crime novel. A graduate of the University of Virginia’s Area Program in Poetry Writing, she published a chapbook, Write Home (Finishing Line Press), in 2014 and has a poem in Lisa Russ Spaar’s anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange.