This piece doesn't directly place itself in the pandemic, but I wrote it soon after leaving isolation at UVa for Covid-19 in the spring semester. It is full of symbols encrypting/representing the pain, nostalgia, and lacking that I feel defined my first year of college, a year dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic. It draws on references to other works, such as writing by Wallace Stevens, Arthur Rimbaud, JD Salinger, Joni Mitchell, Kobayashi Issa, the Old Testament, Greek Myth, and references to places in Charlottesville to create a quilted work about the nature of loneliness.

This is a reflective piece from December of 2020. We'd been on lockdown for a fair bit at this point and honestly, it gave me too much to consider. Instead of staying up every night, pondering the same questions, I decided to turn all my worries into a poem. It just so happens that I was an employee of a company that didn't care about its workers at the same time (no I can't name them, sorry) and our CEO was making an insane paycheck while we got paycuts. The two combined into an amalgamation of my fears. This is that result.

Cat on Lap is not only a love poem to my cat. It's that too (it was written entirely in an hour while I had my cat on my lap), but it's also a poem about COVID lockdowns, not only because it was written during that time, but also because it's about the mindset one gets when being forced to stay in one place. Lockdown forced many of us to slow down an reexamine how we were spending our time. Some activities were restricted, as were many of the locations we had frequented before the pandemic. Many of our worlds stopped in their tracks, forcing us to spend time with our own thoughts. Cat on Lap is a microcosm of that, an example of how one sees the world and their own thoughts when spending time under lockdown in order to care for others.

I was desperately in need of an artistic outlet that represented my experience during the pandemic. Words came the easiest, and I felt like people might relate to my experience. I remember I sat in my dorm to write and words simply fell from my fingertips onto the page. The pandemic was a huge learning moment in my life, and I constantly go back to this work to recognize and remember what I learned and will never forget.

My poem Tomatoes is about moving to college during the pandemic and meeting my best friends. I was terrified about living with other people and disillusioned with the idea of a locked down first semester. These worries clouding my mind cast shadows over my first interactions with my roommates, but I knew that I needed to secure relationships to make it through the isolation I foresaw. What I did not know is how close we would become, how quickly we would fall into sisterhood. I cannot imagine my life without them. We have bound ourselves so tightly to each other, originally because we could not leave our rooms to meet other people, but now because we cannot stand to be apart. I am forever thankful to these women who call me their friends and to the pandemic, despite the unbearable tragedy it has wrought, for orchestrating the blossoming of our friendship.

Some events that happened during the pandemic prompted me to think deeply and reflect on my past few years. The pandemic has made me think deeper about the relationship between people and peers: are we friends or competitors?

This paper was written during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The essay describes actual feelings I personally felt when Covid 19 was first announced as a pandemic and the subsequent events that happened. Additionally, the essay attempts to paint what the aftermath would be and what the future of a pandemic ridden world would entail. My inspiration in writing this essay comes from experiencing a mix of disbelief and loneliness during the height of the pandemic. Even til today, three years since covid 19 was first discovered, many people including myself are still learning to cope with new found experiences and feelings brought along by this pandemic.

I wanted to share my experience of how getting the COVID-19 vaccine was like a light at the end of the tunnel. Hearing other people's stories about how they also faint when getting a shot or prick inspired me to write this piece, because hearing their stories made me feel less abnormal for fainting, so I wanted other people to be able to relate as well. I also saw first hand how truly incredibly healthcare workers are and wanted to share that experience. For a lot of us, the opportunity to soon get a COVID-19 vaccine helped keep morale high during 2020 and early 2021 and that was just as important as fighting the virus itself :)

This poem was an experiment in focusing on something other than my personal loneliness. I started gardening a lot more during quarantine and felt it could be fun to humanize my plants. It was peaceful there, digging in the dirt and watching something thrive for once. I didn't have to be masked; I didn't have to think about the pandemic catching up to me; how could it? I was alone, in the sense of not having other people around, and my plants wouldn't hurt me. They were little verdant soldiers, proud and swaying in the breeze without complaint. In that sight, I managed to find some peace. I hope this piece offers a small silver, at the very least, of the calm it brought me.

I watched a lot of sunrises during the pandemic. Did you know that plants tend to face towards the light? It's called phototropism. This poem is a tribute to that indescribable feeling I felt in that time. That you cannot change what winds and rains may blow you, you can only reach towards the sunbeams. The moments of joy that I remember are very much the small things that gave me the hope to move forward in this dark time, things like sunrises.

This is a piece I wrote about small, negative moments that are humorous enough to affirm a sense of grandiosity in life. Written during the pandemic, it features reference to being an "essential worker" during some of the harder spikes of the first year of covid.

I have submitted a brief poem about my first experience at the University of Virginia, in the fall of 2020, when the most that first years could do for fun was gather on the lawn and drink in small groups. This first semester at UVa was formative for me because it made me realize how systemic issues can cause fractures between individual relations, pitting people against each other, forcing them to focus on difference rather than similarity. Thus, the narrator of the poem focuses on his hardships -- humorously existential -- while the ambassador focuses bluntly on his own. Neither party really compromises, and the Rotunda stretches out into a hellish shadow across the lawn.