It’s National Poetry Month!

I’m slowly working out a schedule that brings a sense of balance to my life. In addition to my night walks, I’m doing exercises throughout the day, pacing the apartment to boost my steps, and I realized this morning as I refilled the bird feeder that I can use the four steps leading up to the deck for a little extra cardio. Don’t get me wrong—I’m still napping, binge-watching Netflix, and reading for hours on the couch! Today I hid from a giant hornet that somehow found its way into my front room. I’m not pressuring myself to produce, though I’ve closed the quarantine series in order to do NaPoWriMo: writing a poem a day in honor of National Poetry Month. I’m posting poems from SAY HER NAME on social media this week, and I was proud to share this microfilm that I made here in Lancaster with the assistance of the expressive teen poets at The Mix. My editor Ibolya was working in Spain and we swapped lockdown tales while envying the artists in Germany who are getting support from the state. The plan was to film at least three microfilms and release them throughout the month of April, but Corona had other plans. But there’s still a place for poetry during a pandemic! Yesterday I sent a few haiku to my new penpal LR, a teen in detention in Kentucky. Imagine how frightening it would be to have no visitors and no family to comfort you during a pandemic. This afternoon I’m getting ready to work on my last teen character’s back story; I’ve got four teens in a halfway house, all convicted of murder. I was struggling to find the right circumstances for Millie until I heard an adult survivor of Jeffrey Epstein talking on the radio about her exploitation as a teen. It takes so many people to enable a serial abuser like Epstein, and it’s disgusting how he manipulated young girls into supplying him with even more victims—their friends, basically. I’m going to start there. Epstein allegedly took his own life in prison but what if one of his teen victims fought back?

Just as I was getting ready to write, the giant hornet came back. Then I got an email from Ancestry.com letting me know there are new “hints” about my Allen ancestors in Philadelphia. I’ve got 90 minutes before my 2-hour news binge begins at 5:30 with BBC World News. No pressure! We’ve got another month at home—longer, I suspect—so there’s time for everything to get done. Or not…