Alison Lubar
Inedible
Suburban PA, 1991
When Ojisan horse-bites, turns his knuckles to teeth,
to catch my soft, pre-teen upper-thigh, Bonnema wields
a snappy plastic-bottomed slipper as aegis. We all have
matching white bunny ones: her, my mother, and me.
Polyester wooly faces with a little pink triangle nose.
Barely space for toes. Mine are so brown next to them.
My mother warns, Don’t get too dark! like I don’t belong
this bronzed. Phenotype is fate– damns genetic destiny.
The world won’t ever really change, so best to water
it down, best to dilute even if all that’s left is mud.
Runoff from rinsing acrylic brushes. My mother buys me
a stone bracelet to ground, protect. The chakras are really
plastic-coated glass beads. They flake a rainbow, leave
milky translucence, lack any magic. But tiger’s eye is real.
Brown, warm, striated, golden stone. I’d still prefer that
to the expected edibles: chocolate, rum, caramel, cinnamon.
Describing any part of a person that way implies that everything,
everyone melanated is consumable. The world is full of cannibals.
My mother and mother’s mother would blanche me, keep
the almond eyes set in a marble face, unloved by sun. But Oji
instead let me darken like him. Even each pinch was a wish, to turn
softness to steel, something bitter and sharp and always ready to bite,
or at least break your teeth.
When Ojisan horse-bites, turns his knuckles to teeth,
to catch my soft, pre-teen upper-thigh, Bonnema wields
a snappy plastic-bottomed slipper as aegis. We all have
matching white bunny ones: her, my mother, and me.
Polyester wooly faces with a little pink triangle nose.
Barely space for toes. Mine are so brown next to them.
My mother warns, Don’t get too dark! like I don’t belong
this bronzed. Phenotype is fate– damns genetic destiny.
The world won’t ever really change, so best to water
it down, best to dilute even if all that’s left is mud.
Runoff from rinsing acrylic brushes. My mother buys me
a stone bracelet to ground, protect. The chakras are really
plastic-coated glass beads. They flake a rainbow, leave
milky translucence, lack any magic. But tiger’s eye is real.
Brown, warm, striated, golden stone. I’d still prefer that
to the expected edibles: chocolate, rum, caramel, cinnamon.
Describing any part of a person that way implies that everything,
everyone melanated is consumable. The world is full of cannibals.
My mother and mother’s mother would blanche me, keep
the almond eyes set in a marble face, unloved by sun. But Oji
instead let me darken like him. Even each pinch was a wish, to turn
softness to steel, something bitter and sharp and always ready to bite,
or at least break your teeth.
Biography
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Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, mixed-race femme whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. Their work has been nominated for both the Pushcart & Best of the Net, and they’re the author four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (CLASH!, Spring 2023), and it skips a generation (Stanchion, Fall 2023). You can find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.
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