Issue 3 • Fall 2002 • Poetry

Fetish

Randall Mann

1

Another Saturday, and the straights
and amateurs will come tonight to my ghetto.
Suspension of rights for all, I say.

2

The vernacular? Those who snort speed
are called bag whores; those who shoot
are said to slam. They'll be over shortly.

3

Apply enough waterproof mascara, Tourmaline-
Charged Eye Cream; tweeze the brows -- just so.
Beauty, like politics, is local.

4

I know that love is more than leather,
a tight white shirt, a good stink -- tonight
I am a fetish. I am canonical.

Randall Mann was awarded the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. His first collection of poems, Complaint in the Garden, is forthcoming from Zoo Press in the spring of 2004. He has individual poems forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Salmagundi. He lives in San Francisco.

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