Mobile Art Saturday Poetry – Night at the Roller Palace – January Gill O’Neil
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Night at the Roller Palace by January Gill O’Neil. She is the author of Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014), winner of a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, and Underlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009). She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts.
I have matched mobile art by @ilemusi – Ileana Montaño. To view her Instagram feed, please go here.
If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
via Poets.org
Night at the Roller Palace by January Gill O'Neil
After the birthday crowds thin out,
after the “Hokey Pokey” and “Chicken Dance,”
after the parents have towed their shaky kids
like cabooses ready to decouple
and the pint-sized skaters have circled the rink
like a gang of meerkats spun into a 10-car pileup,
you turn sideways and angle by as “Another One Bites the Dust”
thumps overhead. You give a finger point to the DJ stand
because, in your mind, we are soldiers in the march against time,
grooving to the retro beat while the disco ball shines overhead
cut crystal against rainbow walls.
You glide like Mercury or Apollo Ono
without wings or skin suit, in low-rider jeans
that hug your body like you hug corners,
pass them all on the smoothed-out parquet floor,
worn down by time and rhythm. The trick is
to make it look effortless, remind them that
your quickness is a kind of love. You are the spark
between wood and wheel. And when your cranky kids
hang out by the wall ready to go,
holding those eight wheels by their brown leather tongues,
you give them a wave and keep circling,
Just one more song, you say.
This is your “me” time. It’s all-skate.
You’ve got your whole self in—
That’s what it’s all about.
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter BA (Hons), ARPS is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator, and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.She holds a First Class Honours degree in Photography and is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS).Her journalism, criticism and editorial work have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography and NikonPro, among other international publications.Through TheAppWhisperer, she brings together academic knowledge, professional photographic expertise and more than 17 years of specialist editorial experience to examine contemporary photography, mobile imaging, computational photography, photographic applications and emerging imaging technologies.
