“What was the year 2020 but pain, nothing but pain. But there was poetry, too. How do you write the pain away? How do you make sense of it all? I wanted to write a poem, an acrostic poem for all of the ones who had passed away when it was 10,000, and then I realized that would take a really long time, and that it was too many names. How could I remember them all? And now it’s almost a half a million gone. I can’t write 464,000 poems, but I can write about, maybe 200, maybe 15, maybe one. Just one. Writing poetry stops the blood from freezing. Writing poetry makes sense of the unbelievable, of the untenable. I write to breathe. I write to allow light into the darkness.”