Starstruck
       

We defined our eyes with Sophia's kohls,
we glossed our lips with Sandra's tangerines.
We hoarded their pictures, clipped from magazines.

Boys had baseball cards. We had these.
We swapped them in our bedrooms and backyards.
We held them close, adoring them like holy cards

though grace was not what roused us: they lent glamour.
It pricked us with new yearning. Hypnotic pictures!—
hooking us yet loosening old strictures.

Anne Frank, we knew, brought film stars to the annex,
plastering the wall, she wrote, with her collection,
fixing them there for everyone's inspection

but for her own revering too, as saints of hope.
Our plight was not as hers, nor were our minds as fine
but in this one way she was like us: a girl entwined

in dreams of fame and powerful allure,
a girl becoming a woman. We couldn't be sure
but we wondered, as she followed

past the threshold on that siren-blasted night,
if she turned her head for just a second,
toward the photographs, for a last gulping sight.

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Copyright © 2015 Kate Bernadette Benedict All rights reserved
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Umbrella Editions
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