floor. I had decided not to take a job right away, but to keep concentrating on the strange bundle of poems I was writing, ones that revealed my most hidden preoccupations: sex, gender, animal puberty, bizarre fetishes and the Midwest, the Loch Ness Monster despairing of ever being able to leave her remote silver-skinned lake and get an education. I was never sure whether these long stretches of refusing to draw a paycheck were a mark of my entitlement or the only act of rebellion available to me. My flaming certainty that I was born
