Gary KuhlmannSongWhen I am dead, my dearest, sing the blues. Break open a scorching blue rainbow of violent roses. Throw your arms around skyscrapers filled with colorful suicides. Reach in vain for the branches of cold flame that reduce me to star dust in a twinkling. I'll see you in the shadows of planes passing over. Like a cloud, your amnesia will run everywhere, rampant especially where I won't be again. I'll feel the rain come on like subways rumbling. Yeah, sing the blues. I'll hear you knocking the dog who wouldn't go away just because one night you let him stay. I'll hold my breath as you drag my memory into the back seat of a taxicab at midnight and down an octave or two, bringing it all back home and hitting the bridge triste and largo. Gary Kuhlmann writes: I'm a Zen Buddhist living in Iowa, I work as an editorial assistant for a university publication, and I try to spit out a poem or two now and then when I'm not sitting on a small black cushion or a hard office chair. A graduate from the University of Iowa in Journalism and English, I own a fine collection of rejection slips from the Iowa Review. Home | Editor's Desk | Poetry | Prose | Guidelines | Email | Links |