Tonight's Poet Corner: I'm Going To Be A Movie Star

I'm Going To Be A Movie Star
by Belinda Roddie

The movement you've created
in your head has relocated
to the hottest points of Los Angeles,
where the smog is so thick that you
could cut it into slabs and serve it

to salivating twenty-somethings
subsisting on manuscripts and broken
dreams. Look, their eyes are star-crossed,
but the constellations are red, and pulsing,
and more alive than they perhaps deserve to be.

Never once did I think you'd go back
to that smoke bomb of a city, cracked teeth
and dangling jaw and all, like a boxer
still throwing punches after all the dislocation
in his joints. See, he'd smile, but he can't;

his mouth remains eternally open. His fingers
have grown numb after the first impact.
And he goes home to a wife who misses
kissing him, sleeps to stop the pain, only
to become as disfigured as an incomplete
puzzle in the morning. But you want to put

yourself back together again. You've craved
it since college, and you hope that at
your auditions, the film producers present will
recognize the pattern of your stitches.
They're no good with a needle and thread, but

they're sure fucking capable of telling you
how pretty you are. They are masters at pouring
you charades in a glass while perched cross-legged
on their seedy couches. You wind up smelling like
Chardonnay and cheap weed and shame, and

as you limp your way downtown, you're
reminded of nights without sky glow, and
summer stock theater, where you sang to me
on a balcony and caught the moon of
the spotlight against your plastic tiara.