Randall Mann

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.
...

the relationship between
blackbird and fencepost, between
the cow and its egret, the field
and wildflowers overrunning the field—
so little depends upon their trust.

Here, in God we trust
to keep our cash and thoughts in line—
in the sky, an unexplained white line
could be the first of many omens.
But this is no country for omens,

the line as chalky as the moon,
bleak and useless as the moon
now rising like a breath of cold air . . .
There is gullibility in the air.
...

Like eelgrass through a glass-
bottom boat on the Silver River,
I see the state, obscured yet pure. Derision,

a tattooed flame crackling
underneath the lewd, uncool
khaki of an amused park worker.

I was the sometimes boy on a leash,
my sliver of assent in 1984 —
as if it were my decision.

The I-75 signage, more than metaphor.
As if I had the right to vote.
The slumber parties then were hidden wood;

the tea so sweet, the saccharin
pink and artificial, like intelligence.
The science sponsored in part by chance.

I made my acting debut with the red
dilettante down the street, "Rusty" Counts,
in Rusty Counts Presents: Suburbs of the Dead,

straight to VHS. My parents phoned a counselor.
A palmetto bug read Megatrends on the fold-
ing chair by our above-ground swimming pool ...

The pool shark lurked, but not to fear.
The end unknowable, blue, inmost, and cold,
like the comfort of a diplomatic war.
...

It's silly to think
fourteen years ago
I turned thirty.

How I made it that far
I'll never know.
In this city of hills,

if there was a hill
I was over it. Then.
(In queer years,

years
are more than.)
Soon it will be fifteen

since the day I turned thirty.
It's so remote.
I didn't think I'd make it

to fourteen years ago.
Fear lives in the chest
like results.

You say my gray, it makes
me look extinguished;
you make me cringe.

I haven't cracked
the spines of certain paperbacks,
or learned a sense of direction,

even with a slick device.
But the spleen doesn't ask twice,
and soon it will be fifteen years

since I turned thirty.
Which may not sound like a lot.
Which sounds like the hinge

of a better life:
It is, and it is not.
...

Prince Rogers Nelson, 1958-2016


"Adore" was my song
Back in '87—
Cool beans, I liked to say,
Desperately uncool.
Except for you.
Florida, a dirty hand
Gesture; the state, pay dirt.
Headphones on, I heard,
In a word, you were sex,
Just in time. Who was I
Kidding? Then, as now,
Love is too weak to define.
Mostly I just ran,
Not yet sixteen,
Overreaching. Track star,
Pretty uniform.
Queer, of course. Adore.
Rewind: my beloved teammates
Sometimes called me Cinnamon
Toast Crunch, or CTC, being neither black nor white.
Until the end of time.
Vanity would never do it for me.
Would you? You were definite, the
X in my fix. And now,
You're gone. The old, on repeat. The new
Zeal: zero.
...

Please
consider Ocean Beach
out of reach.
Try not to gulp
the green water
we porpoise
like employees.
My purpose:
your thought-partner.

There is a feeling
just shy of feeling,
like tongue on teeth.
Disbelief
hangs there,
an ill-chosen comma,
a lanyard with a pass.
I swear the train is coming.
I'm only here to help.

A client bought,
on second thought,
that House in Vermont.
Night is flirty words
with fiends,
the phlebotomists
from Quest
boning up on Thoreau.
It's too soon to throw

in the cards.
Live and let give?
Here. Let me give
you the high-five.
I searched;
my activism,
lightly starched.
I never meant
to live in euphemism.
...

in memory of Reetika Vazirani (1962-2003) and Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009)

Sewanee, Tennessee.
Summer of ‘96, I went there for
booze and poetry and rest.
I danced a little dance;
I talked a little shop.
I forgot a recent ghost.

"Invitation to a Ghost"
was my favorite poem in Tennessee.
And Justice taught my workshop.
(God love him, he called me decadent for
ending a line with an anapest.) At the dance
party with Allison and the rest

of the poets from Rebel's Rest,
ambition was the ghost
unseen, but always in attendance.
And I misplaced my faith in Tennessee,
upon a hill: I gave an undergrad what-for
after priming him with lines of Bishop.

Gossip is another word for talking shop.
But Rachel, sharper than the rest,
winner of things I hoped for,
was above all that, like a charming host.
She spoke of posterity in Tennessee.
And every day felt like a dance

preparing us for a bigger dance.
In the bookstore, I pretended to shop
with Reetika, Rachel's roommate in Tennessee,
wicked-funny and stunning and rest-
less. We flirted like we stood a ghost
of a chance. I was twenty-four.

I wonder now what it's all been for:
that summer; the words; the awful dance
that followed. So many ghosts.
Let the muses close the horror shop.
Let Rachel and Reetika rest.
—Years ago, there was Tennessee.
...

in memory of Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, and Tyler Clementi

There are those who suffer in plain sight,
there are those who suffer in private.
Nothing but secondhand details:
a last shower, a request for a pen, a tall red oak.

There are those who suffer in private.
The one in Tehachapi, aged 13.
A last shower, a request for a pen, a tall red oak:
he had had enough torment, so he hanged himself.

The one in Tehachapi, aged 13;
the one in Cooks Head, aged 15:
he had had enough torment, so he hanged himself.
He was found by his mother.

The one in Cooks Head, aged 15.
The one in Greensburg, aged 15:
he was found by his mother.
"I love my horses, my club lambs. They are the world to me,'

the one in Greensburg, aged 15,
posted on his profile.
"I love my horses, my club lambs. They are the world to me."
The words turn and turn on themselves.

Posted on his profile,
"Jumping off the gw bridge sorry":
the words turn, and turn on themselves,
like the one in New Brunswick, aged 18.

Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.
There are those who suffer in plain sight
like the one in New Brunswick, aged 18.
Nothing but secondhand details.
...

Something has to give.
We stand above it all.
Below, the buildings' tall
but tiny narrative.

The water's always near,
you say. And so are you,
for now. It has to do.
There's little left to fear.

A wind so cold, one might
forget that winter's gone.
The city lights are on
for us, to us, tonight.
...

A giant bird-
of-paradise
has climbed the bar:
in this paradise

there are no flowers,
no flowers at all.
When Happy Hour
becomes Last Call—

Adam in drag
our royalty—
we buy her gin
for eternity

(an unseen deejay
scores the years
with pulsing music
of the spheres).

Now the queen has gone,
gone again
in search of love,
in search of sin.

It's closing time.
You were not at fault.
I drain my glass
and lick the salt.
...

Purgatory must be like this,
myopic, wet, all noise white,
the ocean inexhaustible.

The old woman to our right
could have been a saint, clothed
in layers and layers of white.

And the terns, they strutted
then scattered when a sopping dog
ran in, then out, of the thick fog.

I was grateful you had pulled
me away from my dull schedule
for that walk, though I,

selfish to the end,
could not bring myself to say so.
I'll say it now, too late:

purgatory will be like this:
the nothingness behind us,
the nothingness ahead;

you and I, arm in arm—
two men holding each other.
...