Virtual Teaching During Coronavirus Lockdown: A Poem

Virtual Teaching During Coronavirus Lockdown

1.

Google Meet mini poetry workshop—

Olivia, Patricia, and me in our separate

Hollywood Squares, Brady Bunch tiles.

I join, leave my HP on, leave for the boiling kettle.

Ping—Olivia, I know her voice, calls out

“I have my mask on.” 

I imagine one with a painted wolf snout.

But where is she if PPE-ed?

Ah, not an N-95 or repurposed diaper

or winged sanitary pad

but a green bio-Clarify Clarifying Masque

for purifying her pores.

2.

First time in 34 years teaching, I’m in control

of how I look—fluffing my bangs

to shade my incoming skunk stripe.

The five cowlicks tonsuring the back of my head

won’t show when I message in the chat bar.

And how could I have assumed

such a Harpo Marx grin all these years,

making a wide flat funnel of my chin?

Now I smile with The Joker teeth—

have been brushing with peroxide.

I lean into the camera to get cozy.

I cup my jowls in my palms.

3.

Patricia (my estranged sister’s name),

is sitting in her car. Her aunt and uncle have the virus,

were arguing—“So, I know they’re better,” she says.

Still, she mutes and unmutes herself.

Her phone is low, her face towering above us—

this time, without the Blue Buddha tapestry

forming a halo behind her head.

Dusty, her guinea pig, is sitting in her lap—pees.

Patricia strokes her back. We ask to see her.

Olivia’s mask is forming a map of rivulets.

I winch my teabag out of my Dickinson cup.

I present a poem. We caress commas.