They’re dressing up cats on Facebook
and someone has taught a dog to play volleyball—
a natural, he always makes the return.
Bocelli and Orlenski transcend and console,
nepenthe for the quarantined.
I hold onto a kitchen chair and learn to plié.
The ballet master of the Houston Ballet
Instructs from a chair in his kitchen.
Paperwhite narcissi bloom down at Dan’s.
My dogs eat brussels sprouts. Images
of silliness and bodies in bags compete.
In self-isolation I plant pansies— des pensée—
and a slate colored junco in the Zelkova
watches me dig holes and think about you.
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Virginia Beards taught British and European literature for 23 years at the Brandywine Campus of Penn State University. She has published a poetry collection, Exit Pursued by a Bear (Oermead Press, 2014), short fiction in Chester County Fiction (Oermead Press, 2011), contributed to the literary criticism industry, and re-discovered and edited a 19th century novel, The Real Charlotte, for Rutgers University Press. She is currently completing Inside the Kaleidoscope, a poetry collection. She has an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, a PhD from Bryn Mawr College, and lives on a farm in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster county where her praxis is writing, dressage, and keeping one step ahead of the vagaries of nature and her two criminal dogs.
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