The Minister Speaks: “Our chastened knees and pressed p… Father and Son, you said, were co… the water to wine, the stinking co… mere legerdemain, you claimed,

Bank Caesar An angry man, conceived and birthed in cars, weaned on dumpsters, reared in shattered rooms

A magic trick will awe the laity, So though it make of me a vile par… I say if he had lived Year One A… Copperfield might be today’s Mess…

Gimme That Ole-Time Religion I As one New Yorker said, the guy w… You in New York, your wallet as h… At least has goals, unlike the oth… Who kill and maim and have no aim…

Tracing writhing streams, circling alpine wastes, tickling out a finger nudged between two behemoths, the crooked ring completed at last

Poetry Editors To Poets Don’t send us dull pentameters; That stuff’s for Keats and other… Submit no rhyme, but heaven knows We hate a poem that sounds like pr…

The Pathetic Fallacy Revisited I’ve seen near shore a sycophantic… A cautious waiter at an osprey’s f… I’ve seen his cohorts find the bea… Their interest in the dumpsters mu…

Electrocutions show our love of ri… We give the favored one a kingly f… As well as pen and ink so he can w… The thoughts that we will prize wh… We see his needs are carefully add…

No, birds are not lizards; birds a… I’ve seen a grackle rush from here… for no apparent reason. I’ve seen a lover-loser stab the earth with tiny beak,

Ms. Dickinson’s TV Western for… A cone of force, perspective sharp… pricked with gleams from sabers si… moves out at dawn to cross the pla… and save the souls at the distant…

Levels of Innuendo The cosmos may contain a constella… That holds a jealous planet, one t… To hurt some stars with black insi… And smudge with covert smears thei…

Elephants, Lawrence wrote,* let love bloom slowly “in their vast shy hearts.” But Lawrence dreamed. The beasts, it’s true, were once

A Disney creature has soulful eye… Inhales the posies, gnaws no flesh… Knows sin from virtue in a flash And sobs a quart when Mother dies… A Disney creature lacks an anus,

Pasiphae, like any ancient Greek, Was avid fan of bestiality And lusted for the Cretan bull’s… But he, bull-headed, snubbed her u… For this bovine disliked a human f…

Higher Powers From birth to death some others mu… You see, as infant, round-faced, g… Above the crib, to serve you, need… Precluded by efficacy of sobs.