April is National Poetry Month, and before we say goodbye to it tonight, we wanted to share a poem written by staff reporter Jessica Montoya Moreno that we feel captures the mood of the last year of pandemic living with spot-on accuracy.

“When I made this poem I was just sitting looking at my eternal homework like every day,” Jessica says, “and I started to walk around the house because I was bored, and I looked at the sink and I found a cup. Then I went to my room and sat and just started to do one of my homework assignments. Then I thought about how many times I did the routine: wake up in the mornings with a bunch of sleep and going to bed super late and waking up feeling like I was a zombie just walking around not even thinking of where I was going. So then I sat on the chair and opened a Google doc and started to write about how the routine was for me. And my mom later on in the evening yelled like a couple times to do the dishes, which are always eternal like when you think you cleaned them all, no, they keep coming back so I added it in the poem, and I laughed just thinking about the things I could compare it with. I showed it to some teachers, and they started to laugh because they said it was a ver funny poem and something they could connect to.”

The writing, Jessica said, came pretty easily to her.

“It was also kinda easy to do the poem it all just came in my head, and I started to type. My eyes kinda hurt, so I added it in the poem because since I guess we all look at the screens too much. We all eventually like get to a point where we are like, ‘Wow, I’ve been sitting here to long. I’m a look away or walk around. And every time I walked around, the dishes were as if they were making fun of me.”

“Quarantine Mood”

Boredom is overcoming my presence,

Schools are closed, so online schools we go too.

Eyes begin to hurt, screens are too bright.

Staying up trying to rush and do all my work in one night.

Attempts fail, the evil night has dusted its magical dust on me tonight.

My eyes begin to close, I try to scream but no sound comes out.

The rays of sunshine, shine on the work I failed to complete,

The night has left me weak, taking the energy from me

Draining me, nothin left but an empty brain.

Zombified, I walk over to the work I must complete

I pick up where I left off, in a rush knowledge starts

To enter my brain  like a cure that is found

But then again, I know that if I finish my work. 

I won’t have anything to do, afterwards,

Voices in the house are becoming louder,

then the rhythm of the drums in the movie of Jumanji play,

as my work comes to an end joy erupts like a volcano,

but then the ashes fall, and the lava flows,

 and that’s when I realize something horrible is about to happen,

Like a foreteller a, prophet I’m correct

predicting what happened next, a battle cry erupts,

it’s my mother, with a long scream of my name,

Telling me to wash the dishes and to do something 

because she doesn’t think I have been doing anything,

then as if automatically, I sigh. And what I see next

is like a living nightmare, the pile of dishes that have been accumulated

The pile looks straight out of a horror movie unbelievable,

My enemy was here, and bigger than before 

I start to approach the pile in the kitchen, our battle field

And I give it an evil look and say I will defeat you pile of dishes you will not win,

And ‘‘boom’’ the battle has started, but like always,

I win the battle even if I took long, they never saw what came next,

The soap got them surprised, and the dish scrubber got them all,

I give an evil grin as I say see you soon for the revenge.

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