August 11, 2022

Greg Kosmicki

A HAZARDOUS BRUSH WITH AN ABNORMALLY EXTENDED FEELING OF WELL-BEING

Sometimes you can be so happy and it’s inexplicable,
driving your car down the freeway
or sitting in your kitchen eating an apple

or say you just completed a mundane task
like putting two stacks of paper into order.
It has nothing to do with that probably

probably it has nothing to do with anything.
You can actually be happy for no real reason
just as you can breathe for no reason

or take a dump for no reason
I mean, other than the obvious reasons
or maybe it’s only because you can say reason

at least as many times as you’d like
at the end of a line for no reason.
If someone tells you you can’t be happy

tell him take a hike, there is no reason
not to be because if you want it to be it can be
and you don’t even have to have a reason

to be happy, you can just be
kind of like a spider might be happy
sitting up in a corner in her web

trying to think about whether or not
she can understand the concept or even
if she cares or not. There is the web,

and the corner, and someplace flying toward her, lunch,
and someplace a poem that ends with the word lunch.

from Rattle #33, Summer 2010
Tribute to Humor

__________

Greg Kosmicki: “I write poems because I’ve found that it’s the easiest way to agitate my wife of 36 years.”

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May 5, 2017

Greg Kosmicki

THE LUCKY ONES

In 3 days I’ll be 64 years old
and I still haven’t figured out
how to write a slam poem.
I also don’t know if I’ll be
able to go to work for 6 more years
or so, but I’ve got an easy job,
so I think I’ll make it.
It’s weird to be at that point
in your life where you know
as a reality the inevitable
reality you used to scoff at
more or less, as a young man.
It’s also weird how you think
when you are drunk
that you are much handsomer
and glib than you actually are,
but the good thing about that is
whenever everyone else is loaded
they don’t know the difference.
It’s weird how a lot of things
in life are like that.
Sometime along the way when you
get off the bus and walk
around the gum and potholes
to a job every day, you notice
that whatever you do is only
as worthwhile as the rest of your
society’s willingness to accept
that what you are doing
makes any sense whatsoever.
There really is no reason
for much of anything humans do
once you get past hunting and fishing,
farming and shelter building.
Oh, sure, art makes sense too
if you look at the cave drawings.
Everything else is an agreed-upon
arrangement we promise
not to make fun of each other for—
sitting at desks making up stuff—
then we exchange pieces of paper
we agreed upon has value,
sometimes we laugh,
sometimes we cry, depending.
Nowdays everybody wants me to
buy a lot of gold but I would rather
have some dirt and a few seeds,
which you can’t have anymore
because they’re patented,
and people want us to use up all our water
so we can get more oil to power
our cars so we can get
to the pumps to buy more oil.
If you think about this stuff too long
it will make you crazy,
and of course if you don’t
you’re going to go crazy anyway
if you live long enough
which is where I’m getting
closer and closer to, and almost
every day at my job I see
the lucky ones who made it
to the Manors and the Gardens
and the Vistas, which is why I still
like to stay up late
at night, especially nights
like this when it rains,
when the earth has forgotten,
and I can hear the thunder crack.

from Rattle #55, Spring 2017
Tribute to Civil Servants

__________

Greg Kosmicki: “I worked for the State of Nebraska for almost 25 years as a social services worker, a Medicaid and food stamps worker and supervisor, and for the last twelve years as an adult protective services worker. Before that, I worked two years for a private agency providing case management services for homeless mentally ill persons. Prior to that my wife and I lived four years in a privately-operated group home for developmentally delayed persons, which we managed. Though these sorts of work are quite literally gold mines of human interactions for a writer to use, rarely have I written directly about my face-to-face experiences with the people I served because it did not feel ethically right to do so. Rather, I wrote often of the frustration of the need to work when all I wanted to do was to sit around, be a spoiled poet, and write. I retired in June of 2016 when a golden turd I wrote about in a poem in 1981 fell out of the sky, fulfilling all my magical thinking about poetry, which all who know me well know I have always worshipped as my primary god.”

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July 8, 2015

Greg Kosmicki

WHENEVER I PEEL AN ORANGE

In Memoriam, J.W.

It’s 1:30 a.m. or so, and a little while ago
I ate a banana.
I got up from the kitchen table
and dropped the peeling into the trash can
then ate an orange that I peeled
all in a long continuous strip
and dropped that in the trash too.
The orange, like all oranges,
was tart and burned my dry winter lips
a little when I ate it.

Whenever I peel an orange that way
I think of this guy I used to know
at my job who was a nice guy
but on the opposite end of the spectrum
from me politically.
He used to peel his oranges
then hang the skin
on the wall of his cubicle.
I never asked him about it
but guessed he did that
because there was always
only one fresh orange peel spiral
hanging from his cubicle wall.

He was a guy who believed in a literal
interpretation of the Bible
however it was that his preacher
happened to literally interpret it
so he’d get visibly angry sometimes
when we talked and I would say stuff
that I knew would piss him off
just to see him get all flustered
see his eyes narrow a bit
shoulders hunch or sometimes
he would draw back
look down his nose at me
like he was examining
a dangerous species of insect
before he found some way
to crush it.
Even though he was weird that way
I always kind of liked him
maybe because he was an old farm kid
from far out in the central part of Nebraska
and I was an old farm kid from even farther out
in western Nebraska, only I maybe
fell in with a crazy crowd and smoked dope
and dropped acid in the navy
while he walked the straight and narrow
in the army and held on
to all those home-grown values.

He was a master with the copy machine—
I, the kind of person who makes them jam up
just walking by—
so one day I asked him how he knew so much
about copy machines.
He kind of swelled up with pride
said he’d been some kind of printing technician
in the army.

But there at our job he had a hard time
adjusting to changes
and our job was always changing
thanks to cuts in funding
and a general overall attitude
of contempt for the poor
our right-wing governor had
in the red-necked state
we lived in and worked for.
I was the guy’s boss so I knew
the tough time he had adjusting
and I knew how he bucked the system
his own way by trying
to continue using all the old ways
because they were better.

One time before he got sick he told me
he was having trouble with his son
he was worried about him
who kept getting towed at his apartment
because he wouldn’t buy a sticker
or something goofy like that.
I felt queasy he would confide in me
about anything, especially his son
though it seemed like he was just making
dumb mistakes, nothing major like meth
or addictions to something else
like my kid that I’d never
shared with him, and never would have.
I thought his kid was being stupid
but didn’t say that and listened
father-to-father as though
he was telling me something truly shocking.
I told him tell your kid
buy the freaking permit
and he had, but there was some
excuse. That’s the closest we ever got
but I never could figure out
why he talked to me about it.
It was a closeness that I’d never felt
we either one had earned.

He was diabetic and overweight
but always ate carefully, low-carb,
took a walk in the lunch hour
to keep his weight down.
Explained to me how diabetics
can’t burn up carbs like normal.
He always said “Be careful”
as a way to send you off
at the end of the day
when most people would say
“See you tomorrow” or “Be good.”
One angry client took it wrong
one time and I had to defuse him—
“What did he mean by that—‘Be careful’—
was that a threat?”
The last time I saw him, he was heading out
for the weekend, had on a pair
of shooter’s goggles,
made me think somehow
of James Dickey, though I never told him
because I would have had to explain.
I talked to his wife on the phone
because she called in to say
he’d be out for tests
or for another two weeks
or that he’d be back
or they’ve got to do more surgery
or that he wasn’t coming back.
He’s the last guy I thought
would die out of all the people
I’ve worked with
who smoked cigarettes,
drank sodas, ate junk
and never exercised.
On a routine visit
it was the dentist
who spotted
the lesion.

I think of him every time I peel an orange
whether I can get that one continuous strip going or not.
No matter if I’m at home or work,
peeling an orange for breakfast
or like tonight, alone in the kitchen
waiting out stuff, I think of him
and wonder which one of us
was right, or if there is such a thing
as right or wrong
whether he deserved to die
if God was watching over him
and me, and if he let me live on
to think of him somehow to keep
him alive that way,
why it passed we came to work together,
and if I had been first to die
is there anything he would have remembered me by.

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015

__________

Greg Kosmicki: “I’ve thought for years about my co-worker—always reminded of him the way the poem says, and tried writing it a couple times. When I peeled this orange, maybe the thousandth since then, I realized the orange spiral was the trigger, so I started with that, then wrote out everything about us that had been bumping around in my head ten or so years.”

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April 1, 2015

Greg Kosmicki

SATURDAY MORNING 6-22-2013

I should be out mowing the lawn.
It’s way overgrown, I haven’t mown

in three weeks, and we’ve got company coming by
for the 4th of July. I am sitting in the recliner

with my feet up, wearing a pair of flip flops
with a pair of socks. Every time I do that

my grown-up children and my wife rail at me
that it’s so unfashionable to wear socks

with flip flops, but no one ever said anything
to Ah-Young, our Korean exchange student

all those years ago. The sun is bright outside,
the clouds having cleared away after an early squall.

I can hear the cars go by in the street making
that car-goes-by-in-the-street sound

that I decided finally a couple years ago
to include in my subconscious inventory as a sound

of nature, along with the wind soughing through the trees,
waves crashing onto shores or merely lapping,

the sound of rain as it falls on anything natural
or made by people, the movement of feet

across a surface, or the robin exclaiming
in the tree in my yard that he is there and has

something to sing about. He may be shooing
the other males away, he may be calling

to the females of his species, he may be singing
because that is what he can’t stop himself from doing.

from Rattle #46, Winter 2014

__________

Greg Kosmicki: “I like to write about what’s happening around me. It’s weird because when I write most of my poems I think that they are really shit because nothing ever really happens very often in day-to-day life, and I can’t figure out why I bothered to write them. Then, when I come back to them a few weeks or months later, there they are, and I feel like I’ve stumbled upon some artifact in an old cave, of a day and a time that are no more, and I am happy that I was able to capture that. Plus, I have found them to be invaluable tools in the never-ending struggle old people have about who was right about when something happened and who was there and what was said—so in a sense, my poems are like a rear-guard action by a retreating army, or maybe climbing ropes played out to keep what was once the present, or sometimes the future we made it to, anchored in the past.”

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June 26, 2014

Greg Kosmicki

APRIL 2, 2013

Because both my wife and I work for a company
that pays a good share of our medical costs
I’m able to take her to the hospital
this morning so she can have a minor operation
to find out if she has cancer or not
of the organ that brought life
into this world three times
with a little help from me.
 
While she is having the doctor poke around
in her most private parts and cut stuff
and scrape and examine—using a camera no less—
the doctor herself a miracle of understanding
and depth of learning to be able to do such tasks
but the camera too, then of course the crude
old instruments they still use to cut
and clean and cauterize—all updated 
by technology—when she’s under that dream
they call anesthesia—a loss of aesthetics,
 
I am able to sit at the table in the lobby
to drink free coffee from a machine
made by the Bunn Company
and to read many pages of a marvelous 
poet who revealed a secret to me
today about his writing that I’d never known
and the doctor was able to come out to show me
beautiful photographs of the interior
of the most secret and might I even say holy
part of my wife’s body, and to tell me
that it looks like everything will be all right, again.
 
Try as I may I can’t imagine a place in the world
where all of this could have come together in one day
for two people, though I know at least a thousand
other women probably had the same operation today
and maybe even one or two of them have husbands
who are sitting in their kitchens at the table
having a glass of whiskey and writing out words
about it, while their wives call them
from the living room to say that some cats
are outside fighting, and he can say
he doesn’t think that that’s what those cats are doing at all.

from Rattle #42, Winter 2013

__________

Greg Kosmicki: “I don’t know why I write poems nor can I explain why poetry is important to me in any way that doesn’t sound corny or clichéd. I don’t understand why anyone would want to write poems when they could learn a useful trade instead, and I don’t understand what people mean by ‘The Writing Process.’ Since 1975 I have written what seem like poems to me and sometimes other people think that they are poems so that’s what I call them. Furthermore, I don’t understand why poetry does what it does. Because of all this, I think in hindsight it’s a good thing I never was able to get a job teaching creative writing of poetry.”

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September 14, 2009

Review by Karen Weyant

WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN COMING TO THIS MORNING
by Greg Kosmicki

Lewis-Clark Press/Sandhills Press
ISBN 978-0-911015-57-7
2007, 112 pp., $15.00
www.amazon.com

Near the beginning of Greg Kosmicki’s We have always been coming to this morning, he addresses his audience with “My Flag,” a poem that doubles as an invocation. He opens his work with a simple narrative gesture: “It is after dinner and I go to shake/the crumbs from the tablecloth./They fall down the porch steps/for the crickets and the mice and the ants”–yet soon, we see the speaker liken the tablecloth to the American flag, “the flag of the friendly country/where even the vermin have enough to eat.” The poem ends with an invitation: “I want you to spill your wine./I want you to get bread crumbs on my flag.”

And where is this invitation, to, exactly? With a first reading of this book, the answer might not be clear. Certainly, Kosmicki’s world is a world of complex characters, histories, and situations. But it is also a world of absurdities. This is not to say that his poems are absurd. No, quite the opposite. In fact, in this newest collection from Kosmicki, we find a poet searching to capture the true essence of life by balancing everyday beauty and pure insanity.

In many poems, Kosmicki steps outside the personal narrative to record the voices of others. For instance, in the short and concise work, “Poem an Old Drunk Street Poet Told My Son at the Greyhound Station” (the title is almost as long as the poem itself), the speaker relays words to live by through another’s voice:

He sees the evil
the people who live there do
but pisses on no one.

Certainly, this poem could be seen as a motto for the entire collection, because in many of his works Kosmicki reports, but doesn’t pass judgment. For instance, in “Sacrifice,” the speaker celebrates a man who lived the “life he knew” — a life that encompassed “sleeping in the park/eating out of the trash.” And in “Mailing Out Poems in Benson” a poet records an act of violence:

Mom stomps around the van
from the driver’s side
curses all the way
to slam the door so hard
it could have crushed the girl’s arm in two
and I bet then in a poem
her arm would have broken off like a wing.

However, it’s the more personal poems that truly strike a nerve. For example, in “Skunk Beer” the speaker, while purchasing a six pack, records a memory of buying Pabst when he was younger, “to dull the pain of whatever it was/each one of us knew had to be dulled/but never could explain.” In “Agent Orange” the persona mourns a past friend who “took care of me/drunk slobbering about my dead brother.” And in “I awaken in a group home for the mentally handicapped,” the speaker seemingly finds both religion and reality in the face of a patient who screams “obscenities in my face” and throws “himself to the floor.”

Certainly, many of Kosmicki’s poems are somber in both tone and subject, but I believe that the majority of his works celebrate the daily ordinaries of life, whether they are victories or challenges. In “Peanut Butter,” the speaker sits with his daughter and contemplates “the miracle” of their quiet time with “a jar of Supper Crunch Skippy/and a knife, and smeared/peanut butter all over the bread.”

While domestic life is a big theme in this collection, nature sometimes takes center stage. “The Dandelion”, for instance, is a sort of ode, a work that celebrates a weed “so tough, the only way to get rid of it/is to poison it heavily/or to get a shovel and dig it out.” However, the poem then goes on to mention that the speaker “looked until I found a woman to marry/who loved dandelions as much as I do.” Another poem, “Migration,” celebrates flying geese by explaining “I read somewhere once about the mechanics of the “V”/how the lead goose takes the brunt of the wind.” Then there’s “Cricket Redux” where the speaker tells us, “They are great singers, those/crickets. They are one great song, one great song of the earth.” Finally, the tiny nondescript little sparrow gets star treatment in “Why I Watch Sparrows,” where Kosmicki relays a list poem that celebrates sparrows’ endurance, especially with these ending lines:

because they think for themselves
because so many other birds are gone from our lives.
because the frogs and toads are disappearing
because they have not ceased to be
because they live wrapped up in the meaning of their lives
because they have witnessed
everything.

Can the angry be sympathetic? Can the grotesque be loveable? Can the lost be found? Can the ordinary be seen as something extraordinary? These are the somewhat clichéd questions that Kosmicki explores. But a reader will find anything but clichés in his answers. Instead, the earnest questions he poses, no matter how bizarre, funny or frightening, always have the answer yes.

____________

Karen J. Weyant is a 2007 Fellow in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and her most recent work can be seen in Slipstream, The ComstockReview and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. She has work forthcoming in Pennsylvania English and The Minnesota Review. She teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.

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