A triptych para pandemia. [Un Poemema]

Abstract

During these months of isolation, still in full force in Mexico where I reside most of us have submerged ourselves in an unending ocean of news, videos and images to not only stay up to date on the latest about the coivd-19 pandemic but also to escape it and carve out some safe spaces for our own mental health and sense of hope. In other words, we rely on the same devices, the same screens, to remain informed and to escape such information. That tension, ripe with poetic possibilities, is perfectly encapsulated by the barrage of internet memes that have emerged commenting, ridiculing and even attempting to explain our shared plight. These, along with my previous research into the language of Internet Memes, were some of the thoughts that went into crafting the poememe A Triptych para Pandemia, where a sense of urgency and hopelessness rubs up against the banality of internet visual culture, written in espanglish as most everything I write since it is the lingua franca of the MX-US border, la frontera that smashed me into shape.