“At Starbucks, I remembered a reading Zhen had given, a reading organized by
the program’s faculty. I had not wanted to go but did. In the bar, he read, ‘I wrote
this in a Starbucks in Shanghai. On the bank of the Huangpu.’ It wasn’t an aside
or introduction. It was two lines of the poem. I was in a Starbucks and I wasn’t
writing any poems. I wasn’t writing anything.”