March 24, 2020

when Penelope teaches us to dance

This is our moment’s improvised classroom: a quorum of friends dotted 
on a cross-country map, laptop screens pulled open like hatchlings tilting their jaws
for a mother-fed meal. A choreography of silent gestures will be our syllabus, 
our teacher in the form of 12-year-old Penelope, banished - like her peers - back home,
where she’s made a 30-second video that meets the pressing question on all our lips: 
“How will we get through this?”
Penelope’s arms seem silky with music, the muscles in her face slack with tranquility,
her body centered perfectly in the frame, hair in loose, symmetrical pigtails.
It doesn’t look like the world she knows is falling exponentially apart. Instead, what I see
is where her feet are pointed: toward everything else that remains.