Greg Kosmicki

Gene Hackman’s Death,
His Wife and Dog’s

When Richard Brautigan put a .44 Magnum
to his head and pulled the trigger in his
living room before a picture window
overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the
town of Bolinas, California, my wife and I
and our two kids were living in Alliance,
Nebraska, and I was a poet working as a UPS
package car driver. I was working on
becoming an alcoholic too so a couple
years later I stopped but I still have those
two fifty-foot sections of trout stream
I got at the local hardware store for cheap
stored down in my basement even after
50 years and 14 moves. I hope Gene
and the missus never knew what hit ‘em.

 

Greg Kosmicki's most recent collection, The dog has no answers, was published in September, 2023, by Main Street Rag Publishing Co. His 2016 collection, It's As Good Here as it Gets Anywhere, from Logan House Press, was a finalist for the 2017 High Plains Book Award. Individual poems of his have been published in Paris Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Kansas Quarterly, Briar Cliff Review, Laurel Review, Poetry NOW, Rattle, Cortland Review, and many others.