For Ethel Rosenberg

On the holiest day we fast till sundown. I watch the sun stand still as the horizon edges towards it. Four hours to go. The rabbi’s mouth opens and closes and opens. I think: fish and little steaming…

On a night like this if a shudder were to shake your flesh as though a nightmare had severed your sleep I could have risen and quietly walked to the kitchen to write you a poem that would bring you…

“Are you at peace? Hast thou killed and also taken possession?” (examples of interrogative sentences in a grammar book)

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a post-war Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero”…

[…] In my confusion I didn’t know how to answer my detractors, those who brand me a poseur because I pronounce the c in the Castilian manner or I say fellow instead of guy (I love) miscegenations (pe…

You’re so brave, you camp-followers of Cain— after Baudelaire, yet! Shit-shoveling first father, your visa was validated when that cretinous cudgel whammed the wandering flock’s shepherd, that day…