Camera Obscura
by Deborah P Kolodji
 

A dark room huddle
we are voyeurs 
of mirror-trick images
dizzy with the view.
A rotating turret 
forces the world around,
pauses at the sign.

"Hollywood"
she tells friends
in St. Paul, breathless
with adolescent dreams.
But her star disappears
long before it is placed 
on the corner of Vine Street. 
Her smile fades to the one
from the plastic surgeon.

The scars are faint, 
camouflaged under 
the watcher's sunglasses.
Not quite human but now
passable, he uploads
data to the mothership.
Bits of hors d'oeuvres
laid out by the pool, his latest
starlet hovers nearby.

Deborah P Kolodji is the president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and a member of the Haiku Society of America.  She participates in many mainstream, speculative, and haiku poetry events in the greater Los Angeles area. Her work has been published in Modern Haiku, Strange Horizons, Frogpond, Scifaikuest, Tales of the Talisman, Mainichi Daily News, Illumen, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and many others. She edits Amaze: The Cinquain Journal and the Dwarf Stars Anthology. Kolodji has published four chapbooks of poetry.