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