Assistant Editor Connor Yeck: In Joshua Gottlieb-Miller’s “I Am Often Reminded That I Am Here to Help People,” we experience the push-and-pull of work and yearning, external authority and internal musing. Caught between a supervisor who likes his days “above average,” and shoppers who are “satisfied just being alive,” our speaker makes store aisles into meditative spaces, a landscape where the mundane clashes with “minor victories” of a “sneaky know-it-all heart.”
To hear Joshua read his poem, click below:
I Am Often Reminded That I Am Here to Help People
Boss takes his lunch with us, asks how my day is going, like I am a customer. Average, Boss says about his own, before I can answer. And then, Average is below average, because I prefer my days above average. This afternoon he’ll see me use a milk crate as a ladder, write me up. (An injury is paperwork, Boss reminds.) This will make his day only more average. Another time, Boss will write: Being intentionally confrontational with our customers has a negative impact to our store.
Forgive my supposed disbelief in self-congratulation, the minor victories of my sneaky know-it-all heart. I felt as if I was floating when a shopper asked about my inner employer. I shrank when a shopper said she was satisfied just being alive, but wasn’t sure if she was setting the bar too low or high.
Did you want your receipt? I asked.
Now I can tell you nothing else about that day. Like many days, perhaps I’d woken to lush winter-blue sky, ice shivering on the surface of the lake, surrounded by cold landscape. My inner employer and I could tell you about the stark singular laser eye of the register, its pure verticality—Whistler’s fireworks, Barnett Newman’s solitary black lines—I had wondered then, why do I look down, past warnings in four languages, and not look every single customer in the eye?
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller’s poetry appears in or is forthcoming from Poet Lore, Concision, Rattle, Berru Poetry Series, and Brooklyn Rail. Multimedia work and hybrid writing appears in MAYDAY Magazine, Bat City Review, and Talking Writing. Currently he tutors in a writing center and teaches creative writing to seniors and schoolchildren.
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