When the fat asshole who’s my student
starts bragging about how he stabbed
his wife and her lover in his bed, I interrupt
and ask how this is relevant. I tell him
we have three hours once a week, and we need to talk
about people’s poems, not their pasts.
He’s a dick, and I did the right thing,
and the other students are glad. They have
all the time in the world for who killed who.
Once he shuts up we sit in a circle, praise
a sonnet about a daughter in a white coffin,
rearrange a villanelle with sapphire eyes
and solid gold hair. We scan quatrains
on Ramadan filling your soul with light, laugh
with pastorals that end up in beloved
honkytonks, compare translations of Villon
pleading please don’t harden your heart.
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