Featured Poet: Alison Lubar
Exhibit in Lavender Gaze
The Barnes Museum, May 2017
I have no interest in gilded saints
spiritually neutering gallery walls
and watching me, another sinner. In-
stead I lust at their adjacent neighbor.
Thick-lined goddess: odalisque
immortalle casts her glance over
bare shoulder, broad back-curve
in one ochre stroke from nape
to those dimples behind hips. Once
at the artist, now at me— how lucky
to be held in yawning awe!
I want to hold her heart-to-heart, press
my palms into her scapulas and wonder if
this is where wings would grow and if she
would take me with her in flight, or just
share rose-petal baths and honeyed mid-
night snacks, a mutual moonlit kiss, or ten-
thousand.
Floor tape necessitates consensual space.
I give us a two-foot perimeter, remain
just another blushing nude underneath– this
nascent love in original skin.
Sestina on the Illusion of Ethical Dilemmas
Thirty slides make up this lecture hour
and the esteemed professor will present
hypotheticals for existential crisis. Reality
is that an argument over semantics breaks
most. Philosophers love the problematic trolley,
continue to question humanity’s moral fiber
or the museum, irreplaceable paper on fire:
fragile fabric. What would we do to save our
“heritage”? The esprit de corps lies truly
in the foundational cultural precedent
to sacrifice five, or allow just one to break
under hypothetical wheels. In reality
there is no risk in lecture halls. Reality
defibrillates every deadened heart at a fire
drill– a classmate pulls the alarm, to break
the monotony of moral turpitude. Our
villains stay in fantasy, untethered to the present
political climate. The path of this trolley
isn’t trackless, turns in route, hurtles truly
into hubs of corporate gluttony. Reality
in resources; they see the earth as a present,
birthright, no matter if the room is on fire
like the cartoon dog in the meme. Our
home is the thought experiment. There is no break
from the vicious proletariat cycle. To break
down the door of a burning house, or switch trolley
direction to hurtle towards one person, not five. Our
question is: Why offer anyone to death? Reality
sees other options. The entire track is on fire
and even if body count is utilitarian, the present
is a perfect oracle. Thought experiments are prescient
with 2020 hindsight: one death is enough of a heartbreak,
nevermind Covid’s millions, the wrong Amazon on fire.
Predicate logic loves variables, simple rules truly
or falsely, boolean speculation. Objective reality
to the statistician for pharma, Bezos or Gates, our
house burning. Our museum exit blocked. Our
bones crushed under the steel tracks we laid. Reality
shows there’s no switch. We still (merely) ponder the trolley.
Weeknight Benediction
The nights you're not here I lie
under your pillow and imagine
it's you, search the sheets for
an errant hair shed in the midst
of some dream or tumble. Green
ivy sheets damp with morning dew
of upper lip perspiration. You leave
a hazy veil, mist like Jupiter’s gilded
genderless cloud that consummates
with rain. I wonder, when do we begin
to smell like each other? I sleep with you
still on me like a dusting of spring pollen,
yellow as solar and still as warm: you spin
my nerves to gold, sapphic alchemy makes
this aegis— today I awaken braver. Tonight
I will love my body like it's yours.
Alison Lubar (they/themme) teaches high school English by day and yoga by night near Philadelphia, PA. They are a queer, nonbinary femme of color whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. Their debut chapbook, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, is out now with Thirty West (May 2022); you can find out more at http://alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.
If you'd like to submit your writing, visual art, film, or other work to be featured in Raven Rabbit Ram, email us at parisofharrisburg@gmail.com.