Favors
I swore.
On the Your
Dior
campaign,
damage. Or
scrimmage:
shirts
and skins
to score;
our orb,
liquid
crush.
I tried.
The Beverly
Hills Diet
(too
many fruits):
strobe
flickered
font on
a marquee,
letters
on a
ticker.
To be
free!
Or, not
to know.
(Doesn’t
hurt
to be
too big
for your
boots.)
I played.
Hide
and seek
the
underside—
abashed,
aside—
poking
fun
under
the table
to make.
Unable
to make,
is what
I meant:
the rent.
Favors,
1981.
Anyone.
On a Stair
Because
it was
new:
pop-up
shows
in windows
on minces
around town;
the wood-
work,
Collingwood
Park.
Prelude;
hebetude.
Seduced
by after
but leaning
more before.
Meaning?
The century
subleased,
my master
tenant
on Tina
in rehab
and I
on a stair—
ragged
screen;
unknown
stains.
Not exactly,
I sat
for dates,
and by dates,
interviews,
followed by
stingy
declarations.
Of balcony-
bingo
epithets at
the Midnight Sun.
With Someone,
I tried.
In that wire,
he told me
he
don’t even
say it
me.
But setting
was a tell:
dumb
lighting;
a bowl
of plastic
fraught
by the bed;
unsuccessful
Rolex.
I erased
the space—
for what?
A pause.
The night-
sky semicolons
an ordinance
for less,
but not
for us.
Randall Mann is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Deal: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). He is on the faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars, works as a medical writer in biotech, and lives in San Francisco.
