by Audrey Rose
Variations on the Electric Slide
The artist, her body a statue
of wet clay in the small gray room,
said boxes w/ light & everyone
nodded & scribbled & nodded again,
but I heard lightbox I heard father
heard cancer heard mother repeat
his doctor back to me: It’s in his eyes
& if it’s in his eyes, it’s in his brain
& if it’s in his brain, it’s in his spine
& in his blood & everywhere—
& everywhere, all at once, my father
entered the room. The light bulb
flashed the thin white palm
of its incandescent hand as he
waved hello—yes light is a particle
& a wave that my father uses
to wave hello or make a song
of his hands & flip me the bird
when I talk trash about him. No, he
wasn’t skinny but he shimmy-flickered
himself electric & slid through the slender
vein of wires from one bulb to another—
you can’t see it, you gotta feel it—
a silly jig he did behind the artist
as she went on to say something
important about life & art & signs
& that once you start noticing them
you’ll find them all at once, everywhere.
Audrey Rose earned her BA in Mathematics and completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of South Florida. She served as an art and poetry editor for Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, and she has guest lectured at USF. More of her work can be found in SLAB, Sweet Lit, Arts Coast, and Halfway Down the Stairs. "Variations on the Electric Slide” is an ekphrastic poem written after “Notations in Passing” in 2023, an art installation made of plywood, light bulbs, ceramic bases, and timers by Alicia Watkinson. Line twenty-three is an excerpt from “Electric Boogie (The Electric Slide)” by Marcia Griffiths.