These

These poems were nominated by the editor of Lips
for Pushcart Awards and serve as recent examples
of the kinds of poems accepted for the magazine.

PAUL’S PARTY

When I was ten, I didn’t think.
I was a creature, one eye on safety,
one on danger, an invertebrate,
antennae alert for blood heat
and its potential for loving me.
I could be crushed at any minute
under the foot of an insult or snub,
thus killing off the foolish mistake,
the robber of my parents’ youth
and passion.

So when a group of us went
to Paul’s party, all the girls
wore slacks and sweater sets
in expensive colors: camel,
apricot, cream. My father was
an appliance salesman
and my mother was
a hate-to-stay-at-home mom,
who shipped me off to the party
in dungarees with cuffs as tall
as juice glasses, a patent leather belt
to glamorize the look from hell,
a puffy party blouse, and God knows
what kind of shoes.

I locked myself in the bathroom,
face bursting into fire and tears
and in the mirror, the clumsy loser,
girl-farmer, my presence in the world
so negligible my own mother barely
glanced at me, and on this fall day
sent me off like a lamb to the slaughter.

The girls knocked on the bathroom door
and begged me to let them in, and I must’ve
told them the truth because I remember
their grown-up words: Don’t be silly and the way
they escorted me back to the party, staring down
any boy who dared to laugh.

When I got home, I let the rage slither back down
to its pit, its hiss at a decibel so low I couldn’t hear it,
even as it fractured the ground beneath my feet.

- Linda Hillringhouse

COOKIES

My feet dangle from the chair, the doctor’s office is cold. I stare at my reflection in the shiny metal table legs. “Walk again from here to the door.” I jump down, they watch me. “She requires cookies in her shoes.” I like cookies, but in my shoes? I cover my mouth, shove my smile back inside, mamma isn’t laughing, stares at my feet. We drive from the office. Are we going home? “No, you need cookies.”

=

I can taste the cookies with dripping chocolate icing and rainbow sprinkles, raspberry jam and chopped nuts. We pass the hospital, my school, the market, movie theater, courthouse, and the piano store. We pull up to the curb. I look out the car window. Buster Brown? Is that the bakery? Holding hands, we go in, it’s filled with brown and black shoes that smell like grandma’s old leather bag left out in the rain. I squeeze my nose.

A shoe man says hello, mamma explains about cookies. “Oh, you have flat feet,” he says. Mamma winces like someone pinched her. The man puts something inside the shoes. I wiggle my toes and try to take them off. Mamma says stop. The ugly black shoes with laces on my feet look like daddy’s work boots and they hurt. The man says, “walk from here to the door.” I breathe in my mamma’s ear, inhale her gardenia perfume. “I don’t want these shoes. I want Mary Janes.”

I point to a shiny black, patent leather pair with a strap, the kind my friend Sandy wears to church. Mamma tells the man we’ll take the ones with the cookies. Mamma frowns when he rings up the shoes. Smiling, he puts the shoes in the box and hands it to me. I look at my feet. I won’t take it. She says I have to wear them, runs her fingers through my hair. My eyes sting, my head hurts and my face is burning.

I climb in the backseat of the car, lie down, curl my toes under until my feet hurt and pretend to sleep. Mamma wakes me up, opens the car door and I smell it before I see it. She takes my hand. “I want the round ones, I tell her, with jam inside and sprinkles on the outside.” Skipping to the bakery, my feet barely touch the ground.

- Margaret R. Sáraco

WRITING THIS POEM IN MY HEAD

My husband has a GPS
in his head
riding on the wooded trails by our home
I follow him the same way
my horse likes to follow his.

That part of me that’s lazy
likes this — I don’t have to lead,
make decisions, bear the blame
for getting us lost
as I most surely would.

Instead, I get lost
in writing this poem in my head

in the reds and golds and oranges
in the shape of a massive tree
bowed so perfectly it forms a doorway
that beckons me through.

I get lost in the crunch
of leaves under hooves

in the shrillness of a bird
calling in the hollow

in the flow
of a swollen stream
before I surface
to coax my horse forward.

On the other side I am present —
make sure my horse doesn’t
fall behind climbing the big hill
that leads to the dirt road.

Here, we canter
the speed terrifying
the rush exhilarating
any moment I could fall off
but somehow I don’t.

When we’ve had enough
we head back the way we came
but it doesn’t matter
without my husband I’d be lost
no map of the forest in my head.
So I let him lead us home

and I finish this poem.

- Susan Lembo Balik

LOST SUPERMAN EPISODES

Were there ever any episodes about
The Daily Planet’s company picnic,
Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane amazed
at how hard Clark Kent can spike the ball
in the newspaper’s volleyball game, and
how far he drove the grapefruit-sized
softball which no one ever really saw
come down? Even back in the office
on Monday, Perry White commented,
Jesus Christ, Kent, what do you
eat for breakfast?

I thought there may have been an episode
where Superman slipped on a bar of soap
in the shower, resulting in a displaced
shoulder, but no one remembers anything
like that. He stops bullets and trains.
What made me think he would hit his
head on a faucet assembly?

Then there were lost episodes in my life story:
I thought I witnessed a UFO over the
future site of the New York State Thruway,
near our bungalow colony in Suffern,
a bright red spot lost in the blue sky.
I was sure I was there, but my brothers
talked me out of that, just like they talked me
out of seeing a single-engine plane
take a 90 degree turn downward, and
crash behind the Pascack Motel by our
bungalow colony in Spring Valley five years
later. Perry White would have said,
Great Caesar’s Ghost, Bob.
You were in the hammock, fast asleep.

- Bob Rosenbloom

Heaven

Do they drink coffee in heaven?
I would hope so.
And that it’s exceptionally good.
My father has been waiting
to have a cup with me since I was 15.
I’m wondering if they allow smoking
or if he had the desire to start again.
Do they even have desires there?
Why would they, having all.
No. No desire in heaven.
The Buddhists are right.
Still, I admire my father’s patience.
He was never one for that.
And finally, we have so much to say,
so much time to talk,
a cup that is always hot and full.

- Kenneth Ronkowitz

I Ask My Therapist Where the Sadness Goes

She says, picture a box. Every detail.
Picture it airtight, its intricate lid
sighing into place without a whisper.
Picture a ball of light the size of a
marble. Make it whatever color says
sadness: azure, amethyst, army green.
Picture yourself tipping your palm. Picture
the light dimming as the lid on the box
clicks home. Put the box on a shelf. Close the
door to the room where the shelf and the box
and the light in the box are kept. Lock it.
Never open it again. Drop the key
down a well in another state. I still
feel sad, I say. Oh yes, she says. Always.

- Frances Klein

It was just to feel something

some of us used razors
to mark ourselves and became
witness to our collective pain

some of us were terrified of the dark
and killed ourselves by remaining numb
to everything alive

some of us were reluctant to go there
unwilling to open ourselves to wonder,
but some of us embraced what seemed impossible
with each passing year

when I was little,
I thought that there were monsters under my bed
or in the closet that would take me away
to some unknown place,
that I would be thrown into darkness
and never would see light again

what seemed like a massacre
when we were young
was just the slow grinding of teeth
so as not to become numb

it was just to feel something.

- Howard Berelson

Ballad of the Bosnian Mother

Yes I raised him, but not to do what he did.
How would a mother think to warn a son,
“Don’t fake your death just to see who cares”?
Who thinks to advise, Don’t leave your shoes
and a note on the bridge? Don’t scatter clothes
on the shore, don’t bribe undertakers to prepare
an empty coffin. And for all that is holy, don’t
hide in the bushes to see who’s at the funeral.
I stood alone, needing a towel, not a hanky
for the tears. No hand to grasp as I walked
over the graves of your father and sister.
Amir Vehabovic, of course no one came.
You pushed any friends away, ravenous
for attention, love, always taking, resentful.
Of course they stopped calling. You wrote them,
complained about the cost of the fake death notice.
“I really thought that more of you, my so-called
friends, would turn up to pay your last respects,”
you wrote. “It just goes to show who you can
really count on.” Your mother, that’s who.
She who carried you through colic, cheered you
through all the bullying, never turning her back.
She survived the worst loss, the death of a child.
Faked. By you. Do not ask me what’s for dinner.

- Tina Kelley

Absolute Threshold

I look at my mother, her gaze empty of knowing
who I was before her loss of memory. My eyes aglow
in a cave, exploring the mystery of her walls. I search
for memories, to make them physical, permanent—
like the hunting-magic scrawled into animals in Caves
of Lascaux to multiply them, make them real. I find
glimmers—rituals, random memoir. I look at my mother,
draw outline over outline, impose what I know of her
onto her— form conclusions I’ve no evidence for.
When I try to fill the void in her eyes, it’s like watching
someone fall out of love with you, not over time,
but in the moment. She says my name, tells me I have
pretty eyes. I am a stick figure on the wall of her mind,
a permanence, slowly being erased.

- Diane DiCillis

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