She Reads in Front of a Fake Zoom Background

So distracting: a beach on Fiji, Olympic
rainforest, or the snow-cone mountains
of the Massif Central, more beautiful
than National Geographic, and why not,
they’re locked in pixel perfection, but
Gramma always told me “beauty is
fleeting”, especially when your ears
begin bobbing in and out of this
snow-capped diorama, your hair
a brown amoeba, pseudopods flailing
because no one sits totally still
while reading any poem. And I’m shuttled
back to 1966, the episode of Star
Trek where Uhuru’s caught in the transporter,
protons half-here and half-other, and it takes
all my strength not to yell “Scotty, we’re
losing her” though you only have two minutes
left to read, but it just would be too, too rude.

Gary D. Grossman
Verse-Virtual, April 2024