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N

By Randall Mann Randall Mann

has crawled out of the ocean

to carry us from sleep, like sleep,

the gray of outer Sunset portending

the gray of inner Sunset. And so on.

On the N, one should invent

intricate fictions for the lives

of the passengers: time is a game.

Soon we will be underground.

But first, the long lush green

of Duboce Park, the happiness of dogs!

Good-bye now to their owners

eyeing one another. Good-bye

to the park's locked men's room,

where once a man was found dead,

his penis shoved into his own mouth.

The world continues, the engine

of the world the letter N.

Source: Poetry (December 2003).

Biography

Randall Mann’s poems are often set within the landscape of Florida or California. Influenced by Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Donald Justice, Mann’s poetry—at once vulnerable, unflinching, and brave in its ambivalence—explores themes of loss, attraction, brutality, and expectation. Of his preference for working in form, Mann says, “Form helps me approach more comfortably the personal, helps me harden argument.”

Mann is . . .

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