Randall Mann Poems

This may sound queer,
but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
of Dan White:
I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
...

This is what he dreams of:
a map of burned land,
a mound of dirt
in the early century's winter.
...

We choose a cheap hotel
because they're serving drinks.
We drink. I hear him tell
a tale or two: he thinks
...

Out of the fog comes a little white bus.
It ferries us south to the technical mouth
of the bay. This is biopharma, Double Helix Way.
...

Jealousy. Whispered weather reports.
The lure of the land so strong it prompts
gossip: we chatter like small birds
at the edge of the ocean gray, foaming.
...

is only something on which to hang
your long overcoat; the slender snake asleep
in the grass; the umbrella by the door;
...

One last meal, family-style —

no family, and with suspect style.

November first, my almost-groom
fresh off his flasher costume

discharge at the office. Harris tweed.
I read it on his antisocial feed.


The motel life is all a dream —
we were, as they say, living the dream.

I appreciate our quandary,
hot-plate dates and frowsy laundry.

Face tattoos are never a good sign.
I hope his tumor is benign.


I won't forget the time he lent
me Inches, which I gave up for Lent.

Our love was threat, like phantom pain.
An almost-plan for a bullet train.

I'm weaning myself off graphic tees,
not taking on any new disease.


I walk along Pier 5 to kill the myth,
of course another stab at myth.

I pull my output from the shelf
and wildly anthologize myself.

I've adopted another yellow lab.
I hope to die inside this cab.


My lack of faith is punctuation —
no wait, the lack of punctuation.

Every intonation, one more pact
with injury; my latest one-act:

"Flossing in Public."
In the spattered glass of the republic
...

I was someone's
honor's student once,
a sticker, a star.
I aced Home Ec and Geometry;

I learned to stab a fork,
steer my mother's car.
Old enough to work,
I refreshed the salad bar

at Steak & Ale,
scarcity a line
I couldn't fail.
The summers between university,

interned at AT&T,
in the minority
outreach they called Inroads.
My boss, Vicki, had two

roommates, whom she
called, simply, The Gays,
crashing on her floor.
That was before

I was gay, I won't try to say
with a straight face.
Like anyone really cares,
I care. What I'm trying to say:

all this prepared
me for these squat blinking
office accessories.
The dry drinking

after the accidental reply-all.
By now there's a lot to lose.
Little by little, I have become
so careful, no talk

of politics, or orientation:
I let them say, he's "a homosexual,"
without an arch correction.
At a fondue buffet

in Zurich, our dumb-
founded senior group
director—when I let slip,
damn it, my trip

with a twenty-year-old—inquired,
They're always over seventeen,
right? I told her of course,
god yes, and, seething, smiled,

which I'm famous for.
I didn't want to scare
her. But I tell you,
I'm keeping score.

E-mail is no more
than a suicide
I'd like to please recall.
Note my suicide.

I'm paid to multitask,
scramble the life
out of fun:
Monday I will ask—

every dash a loaded gun,
every comma, a knife—
you to bury the black-box file.
...

The palms
are psalms.

The nail salons,
manicured lawns.

This is some phase.
The park has been razed.

I miss the hip,
hours at a clip,

their dopey glazed
Dolores haze

(sorry).
I worry

about basic stuff:
my graying scruff,

Ambien addiction.
Eviction ...

— But there's another story:
this site was once a cemetery.

In 1888,
the late

were stirred,
disinterred,

carted somewhere calm, a
nothing place called Colma.

By then the dead
prohibited

in city light.
They thought this was all right:

the dead have nothing to lose;
the dead were Jews.

Hills of Eternity, Home of Peace:
the dead were put in their place.
...

There's a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color

manmade. A still life. And still
life's a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck

like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.
As for the scrub oaks,
the hot wind in the leaves was language,

Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic—
an obsession: I wanted to live in it.
(One professor in exile did,

covered himself in the stuff as a joke—
then spent a week removing mites.) That's
enough. The fields of rushes lay filled

with water, and I said farewell,
my high ship an old, red Volvo DL,
gone to another coast, another peninsula,

one without sleep or amphibious music.
Tonight, in flight from San Francisco—
because everything is truer at a remove—

I watch the man I love watch
the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento,
lit city of legislation and flat land.

I think of Florida, how flat.
I think of forgetting Florida.
And then the landscape grows black.
...