“Downhill on the Bone Bicycle, Dictionary for a Pandemic,” a cycle of 26 poems, was performed as a choral reading on Zoom with eighteen readers participating.

The coronavirus roared in as a public and private catastrophe like none I’d ever experienced. An avalanche of family terror, public health nightmares and national chaos completely buried any personal thoughts or feelings. I was shocked beyond language. All I could do was collect a stockpile of new terrifying words, filling page after page alphabetically. The collecting process proved calming, I could reclaim the experience of my own senses, it gave me a sense of control. By the end of June, the collection had become a cycle of twenty-six poems, “Downhill on the Bone Bicycle, Dictionary for a Pandemic.”

Meanwhile, the country was just coming out of lockdown, though seventy year olds, like myself, were told to stay away from crowds. So a public performance was not possible. I spent my time learning how to communicate by Zoom. By November the virus took a new deadly surge, so I decided to simply invite friends to join me in a choral reading of “Dictionary” on Zoom, hoping it could help them as it had helped me. This was poetry and technology meeting a mental health crisis.

We pulled together eighteen readers in a matter of days, assigned poems to practice on their own. With only a few notes, the reading began at 1 pm on Sunday, November 22. Each reader had only one or two poems to read, each only a page long, titled by a letter of the alphabet. The basic Zoom technology brought a very personal reading to life. The terrible words that we’d all had to learn so fast were shared. Each different voice carried on a valiant relay race, naming the intertwined meanings, helping untangle the fears, and passing the work on to the next. It took the whole group to complete the experience. We could not give up on each other. We were each other’s witnesses. We fell back on the very basics of language to save us—in public, virtually, together.