“Your first assignment is to write a poem about corn.” The girl in the back looks up from her journal. Bobby furrows his eyebrows. The kid in the Twins hat quickly writes down the assignment, CORN, at the top of his single sheet of paper. Dana’s hand shoots up. “But Professor Stevens, I want to write complicated poems.” Stevens picks up his chalk and turns back to the board: CORN IS COMPLICATED.

Dumbfounded but hardly surprised, Stevens shuffles back to the table in front of the room, noisily pulls the chair out, and plops down into it. He stares out the window that faces the street; it’s a still December night—no traffic, no sirens, no obnoxious noise or light. Across the street, a string of colored Christmas lights wrapped around a porch railing glow beneath a blanket of thick snow.

“Write down the name of your favorite poet and five things you know something about,” Stevens commands. “You have five minutes.”

Fridays he breakfasts at Burger King before heading out to the lake, where he smokes cigarettes on the shore and ignores his wife’s phone calls.

Stevens scowls and shakes his head, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and mutters something under his breath about the “catastrophe of modernism” before turning toward the chalkboard. He digs a piece of yellow chalk from his bag and scrawls on the board: WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW.