Zoom Event with Featured Reader Jean Colonomus Followed by Open-Mic

Join us Online with Featured Reader Jean Colonomus with Open-Mic to follow.

To Join us Online, via Zoom, visit our website and click the ‘Join the Zoom Event’ button.

www.wordsoutloud.org.uk/open-mic

Tickets are free, but a £3.00 donation made at our website would be very much appreciated.

https://wordsoutloud.org.uk/donate

Jean Colonomos began her career in the arts first as a ballerina-in-training and then as a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1960s. She segued into writing dance journalism and wrote for Dance Magazine, the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News.

At the same time she was writing poems and play. Ms. Colonomos has won awards in all three disciplines. Her play, Black Dawn, about female victim survivors of the Pol Pot regime, garnered her and her director a Citation from the City of Los Angeles.

She’s been published in several online and poetry journals such as your daily poem, Askew, Spillway and the Avon Poetry Competition edited by Ted Hughes. Her chapbook is Art Farm published by Finishing Line Press.

http://www.jeancolonomos.weebly.com

Imprint

A pint-sized six-year-old squirms at the piano

while the teacher instructs her how to play

Hot Cross Buns, a three-note melody.

Preoccupied with ballerina Maria Tallchief,

who she knows from a photo on a wall

at her ballet school, she deafens to the notes.

At the end of the third lesson, she overhears the teacher:

Mrs. Roberts, you’re wasting your money. Every time

I teach your daughter a tune, she skips off the bench to dance.

In the picture, Tallchief’s head is crowned with

Swan Lake’s iconic white-feathered headband.

The photo calls out to the girl,

a lighthouse illuminating curiosity

where imagination takes the lead.