Randall Mann
The Summer of 1996
Gainesville, Florida
The librarian,
my grave
purveyor
of white
gloves,
rare books:
King Payne
allegedly
danced
on a white
horse;
King Charles IX
named
the peninsula
New France,
off chance,
in 1564.
That’s Florida
for you!
Right.
A summer
of kings,
and clubs,
and queens:
the late
Todd aka
Toddonna
(for money,
she feigned
only
Madonna)
crawled
onto the scene—
drag fight;
fag night—
at Ambush.
Butch.
A monocle
dangled
in her razored
neckline;
she saw us all
for what
we were—
not a lick.
Sick
of suspect
looks,
of plague,
I walked
Paynes Prairie:
one more
vague
elegy,
one more
basin
gone dry,
sand,
fairy
dust . . .
—A heron
stood rigid
as a palace
guard,
great
and blue
and useless.
The last word.
Randall Mann reads “The Summer of 1996”
Randall Mann’s new collection of poems, A Better Life, is out from Persea Books in April 2021. He lives in San Francisco.