Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Seven
November- December 2025
“Looking for the Buddhist Subtext”, poems by Greg Kosmicki.
Pick-up Game With My Dad
How many evenings in the driveway
in front of our house, where the wheat field
stretched before us to the darkening sky
did you pitch a baseball to me,
knowing I’ve never hit it?
Your rimless glasses, later
the brow line ones, shining
above your smile—those white-
picket-fence Kosmicki teeth with the gaps
in the dying sun each evening
but no disappointment,
never recrimination, you always thought
I guess, I’d figure it out, how to connect
and I stood there at your bed
when you gave up your last breath
but hard as I could swing
I whiffed it again, and now
some say you are up in Heaven
some say you are not
but I know you are
out there in the driveway
winding up to lob me
yet another easy one
across the random scrap of cardboard
we called home.
“Looking for the Buddhist Subtext”
if the planet’s dying
why are we all
acting like
it’s just another
ordinary day
tomorrow? Why
did we act like that today?
I didn’t know what to tell him.
Every time
I agreed with him
he came back with
Then why
aren’t you
doing anything?
Is it all real?
is it all fake?
I don’t understand.
A Charm For My Sister
the vibrant women directors of community
theaters, pulling whole towns
together for the summer play,
the coaches getting their game
under control, both their
terrible diseases and their soccer
teams, the mountaineers, the back-packers
at the hidden chalet near the edge
of a remote and barren desert
laughing with friends, holding up
a toast to their own vivaciousness,
who walk into and out of scene after scene
fully in charge again after disease
had frozen them into to living rigor
mortis, sitting at the table
with family and friends, laughing,
talking, smiling, holding the floor
as they had never been able to do
back in the dark days
when their disease was all,
when their disease was what their name
was known for, but now they have traversed
the shoals and rapids, the rocky
boulder-strewn waterfalls of side
effects, of gastric disturbances, flaking skin,
loss of feeling in limbs, inability to have sex,
tingling in their arms or legs, trouble sleeping,
distressing or psychotic dreams
the other side, mood swings, but come out
singing, wide-eyed, full of life, vibrating
some new string in the universe
with urgency, surrounded by friends
and possibilities, able to set up a truck
full of items handmade from feathers and stones
at the farmers market, ever alive,
ever gracious, ever welling over
in gratitude for the small moments
that make up the magnificent tapestry
of life, no tears, no soiled spots,
not one thing gone wrong, you become
after your disease another of this crowd
family and friends gathered around in hope
and admiration, you have more life,
now you can even play the guitar,
hang glide and bungee jump, sky dive
run out into the surf
no longer embarrassed of your skin,
you are alive like this, when this charm
has done its job, performed its humble feat—
just living, with all its side effects.
Greg Kosmicki is a retired social worker who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Greg received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and worked numerous jobs since then, including a 24-year stint as a social services worker for the State of Nebraska. He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997, which published over 120 books of poetry, interviews, anthologies, and fiction. It became an imprint of The University of Nebraska Press in 2017. Author of 15 books and chapbooks of poems, Greg’s poetry has been published in magazines since 1975, and anthologized multiple times. His poems were selected by Garrison Keillor and read by him on “The Writer’s Almanac” on Minnesota Public Radio, with another selected for Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated column, “American Life in Poetry.” He twice received Individual Artist’s Fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council. His 2016 collection, It’s As Good Here as it Gets Anywhere (WSC Press) was a finalist for the 2017 High Plains Book Award. His most recent collection, The dog has no answers, (Main Street Rag Publications) was published in 2024. He and his wife, Debbie, are the parents of three children and grandparents of two.