Celestial Ambition
by Yvonne Zipter

Like Lana Turner, I’ve been waiting to be discovered.
Never mind she wasn’t spotted at Schwab’s Drug Store
but at the Top Hat Café. Never mind she wasn’t drinking

a milkshake but a coke and that it wasn’t Mervyn Le Roy,
the director, but Billy Wilkerson of the Hollywood Reporter
who referred her to the agent Zeppo Marx, who got her

that screen test. And never mind I’ve no desire to be
in the movies. I guess what I mean is I want to be like
that recently discovered celestial body, the star formerly

known as HD 86081, the one they’ve now named Bibhā,
which means, in Bengali, “a bright beam of light,”
which is how I want my words to shine, to burn fiercely

as a lantern in the twilit sky of poetry, to twinkle into view
as if I haven’t been here all…