 Hello everyone. I'd like to add my thanks for staying to the end of this event. It's been so wonderful to hear everyone read and be a part of this group of people in this room right now who are brought together by proximity and by poetry. This poem is called November. When I try to recreate the late nights, they are nothing but sober mornings in disguise. Maybe because it is not October. This, now, is the month of stomachs. Bears and hedgehogs make ready to sleep across the tundra expanse of hunger. In this way, there is control. If not over time, then over the effect of time. In a black planner, I map the hours and assign purpose to each in increments of one or two. Comfort resides in clear delineations. The October pages are almost untouched. A marker of abandon starting the day we met after. I charted hours again as for other lesser months. Always the small and stupid things awaken memory. Is it mine or his, or is it absolved from belonging? He appeared at the door, still unsteady from nighttime activity. I stole a book for you, he said. A gray-green volume from the university library, unlikely to be missed. Until several November's from now, an American Studies PhD candidate seeks the 1941 issues of Mencken's American Mercury. Concerned with the cultural milieu of World War II era American intellectuals. And when he reaches the shelf in three east, he will find space enough for a gray-green volume. I hope he will understand. One reaches fullness only after the feeling of interminable emptiness. For bears and hedgehogs, there is the fullness and then there is the devouring. November, the month of stomachs, stands a poor and useless imitator of October, the month of appetites. In return, I gave him a poem in a stolen envelope. Birds were waking, yet it was not a late night. But the mere ghost of one, like ours in a black planner, defined and then erased. What I wrote for you, I said. I didn't mean it. Only the part about late nights, he said. Quit being so critical, I really liked it. When there is no hunger, what are we left to fill? When there is no hunger, what do we become? And what becomes of us? Hunger is becoming in bears and hedgehogs, but only when they rise for months long sleep, after having chewed slowly on energy reserves. They wake to a spring morning, a world shaken of snow, ready to be complete again.