“In college,” offered one woman, wearing a helmet of expensive-looking silver hair and a sweater tied around her shoulders, “we would leave after fifteen minutes of waiting. That meant class was canceled. It was a rule.”

Janine remembered Beth telling her something similar, but did not imagine such a rule applied here.

“That seems sort of different,” said another woman Janine vaguely remembered meeting last night. She smiled kindly and tried to explain: “College courses last twelve or fifteen weeks, and we have less than two weeks. Plus,” she said, looking around the table. “We are all adults.”

“It was a way of keeping the professors in check,” insisted the first woman. “So they couldn’t just breeze in whenever they felt like it.”

“I’m sure that isn’t—” began the second, more reasonable woman.

“She can leave if she wants to,” said a man with small, puffy eyes, scraggly hair, and a large gold watch fastened around his bony wrist. He spoke with a slow drawl. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass, sweetheart.”

“Maybe we should introduce ourselves,” said Janine. Her own poem was one of the pieces selected for the first workshop, and she did not want to waste time on formalities. “I’m Janine. From near Panama City. I’m married and have two daughters. I’m a high school life skills teacher and this is my first poetry workshop.”

“We’ll just have to do introductions all over again,” complained the woman who, moments ago, had wanted to leave. “Once Lorraine gets here.”

“I’m Manfred Collins,” said the man with the small eyes and the gold watch. “Though I write under the pen name Wilhemina Drexel. For family reasons.”

They had gone all the way around the table, as Janine considered the possibility and wisdom of a pen name, and the possible significance of Manfred’s, when Lorraine arrived, carrying a thin sheaf of photocopies. “Oh good,” she said. “You’ve introduced yourselves.” She did not ask them to repeat their names, nor did she bring up any of the poems selected for workshop. Instead, she wordlessly passed around Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Poetry as Insurgent Art.” Lorraine had each member of the workshop read it aloud, going in a circle around the table. The woman who had wanted to leave—her name was Barbara—struggled over the pronunciation of apocalyptic and Mayakovsky, and Janine worried that she might struggle as well (or worse, be asked to identify some of the poets), but Manfred read the poem with such a flourish that she was confident by the time it was her turn.