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  • My Requiem, Myself
  • Laura Kelly (bio)

inspired by Allen Ginsberg and his poem “Death & Fame”

At my funeral:

Let no widows wail arias of grief.

No distant relatives will hunch in the sodden overcoats of perfunctory sorrow,

     shifting on stern pews,

  and fretting about where they parked the Oldsmobile and how much

longer is this going to take and what did she die of anyway?

Let there be no mother draped over the casket, improvising the histrionics of loss.

Let there be no chirpy obit in the hometown newspaper

raping my resume,

listing survivors,

parsing my milestones in circumspect language and Times Roman type.

Let no dismantled lovers pluck their whining harps of regret

  or clutch hankies that dab at the waterworks of if only.

Let no doleful minister fumble through notes,

    mispronounce my name,

    and remind the gathered that: This event’s official sponsor is God

and his merry band of saints and sufferers.

Let there be no freeze-dried floral horseshoes, spayed of fragrant loveliness.

Let no organ thicken the air with the heavy-handed soundtrack of death.

And please [End Page 664]

Let there be no faltering soprano first cousin whose intentions are good

but whose pitch needs climbing lessons.

No mums.

No veils.

No 23rd Psalm.

No Darth Vader limo shuttling the bereaved behind tinted windows.

Instead let there be vaudeville and limericks and

    my sister reading the lyrics of an old Jackson Browne song.

Maybe a chorus of drag queens in tiaras and waterproof mascara,

jostling to outMarilyn each other.

One with hips like a velvet divan will lay atop a piano and croon in French.

A melancholy cello solo, gardenias spilling their perfume.

Let there be barefoot children with dirty knees and a shoebox of lizards.

They’ll bring Crayola-ed cards of goodbye and float them skyward

      on the coattails of helium balloons.

No one in their Sunday clothes and could those so inclined wear a fitting chapeau?

I want tap dancing,

  key lime pie,

  the smell of the ocean in the air.

Perhaps a calliope.

Perchance the lonesome cadence of a train in the distance.

Let there be drunken pardons and advances.

Laughing and crying in equal measure; wounds never fully healed will be anointed with

potent salves.

Let lovers swap stories and embrace with bold tenderness,

    inhaling the ripe vapors of my longing embedded in

each other’s skin.

Let there be a full moon.

Let there be bagpipes.

Let there be a conga line led by someone passing around transportational herbs.

I want storytelling and Elaine’s Ethel Merman imitation and a group list of all my

nicknames. [End Page 665]

And in the midst of this, in a lull that sadness coaxes

If there could be someone who tinks on a glass and gets everyone’s attention and says:

What I will remember most is how she lived out loud.

Laura Kelly

Laura Kelly, who teaches journalism at the Florida International University in Miami, is a Fulbright scholar teaching journalism at the University of Tirana in Albania. She has published in the Washington Post, Glamour, Parents, InStyle, Newsweek International, Vox, New Woman, and other periodicals.

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