Hari Alluri

A-F

Aug 13

Biography

Hari Alluri is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya, 2017), Carving Ashes (CiCAC, 2013), and the chapbook The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel, 2016). A winner of the 2020 Leonard A. Slade Jr. Poetry Prize and an editor at Locked Horn Press with years of performance, group facilitation, and award-winning teaching experience, he has received fellowships from VONA/Voices and Las Dos Brujas writers conferences and grants from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and National Film Board of Canada. Hari's writing recently appears in the Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2020) anthology, as well as in Apogee, The Capilano Review, Four Way Review, Poetry, Prism International, Split This Rock, Tinderbox, the Poetry in Voice resource, and elsewhere. His recent collaborations are with BIPOC Writing Community, Community Building Art Works, The Cultch & Soft Cedar, The Digital Sala, A Gatheration, and Massy Books. Hari migrated to Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories – unceded Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh land – at age twelve, and writes there – specifically on Qayqayt First Nations land – again.

Poetics Statement

“Even at my most alone, the act of writing is always collaboration. Part of this is by definition: poets work in language. Part of this is the way I find lineage, the way a hip hop sample does and the way that any altar is an ode to the first altar. Here, the poem is diaspora, is—more than just about.  If I write into displacement, it carries a condition of generations, of language, of migration, colonialism’s residue in the places I am descended and continuations there and where I am: on unceded land by way of nation states built by stolen people.  I feel like the poems—even when they remember, forget, and imagine elsewhere or elsetime—encounter place as layers of memory: arrivals, departures, resistances, transformations. Collaboration is here as well: this time it means ingat.  If I write into gratitude it’s because, shukriya, I’m anywhere at all. And music is why, family is why—blood and chosen kapwa: poetry is why. Land is why, ocean is why, fire, sky, spirit: like that.  If I take myself too serious, the tricksters come to play.  And play is crucial. I said earlier that collabo is implicit, the explicit ones help to enact beyond the voice. The truth is: play, I can’t stay here without it.  The poems have small and joyful and monstrous and shifting things to say. And call for images that refuse to be unfound. They grieve. Because they have longings, and call for revision. Even as—Bahala Na—they call out to become.”

— Statement of Poetics, as Adug 

Sample of Poet's Work

A Pavement Sweeper’s Quarry

This street is a moneylender’s duty crowned in smoke. And skin remembers to cherish its own noise. The creaking earth might be a thing to hear.

Avoid the knees of things, I say: they kick.

II.

Here, on the morning ride to work, I’m jealous at the trolley doors: they get to yawn. I would say the city is only mouth if it didn’t hear: we want to stay.

And here, we bury the summer of ourselves—in traffic jam. A single glance at rearview, and headlights gawk for hours, a headlight stream.

We do not want to hover like a line of fog, a river’s shadow, but slower: shadows in conversation, gentle only when we don’t bother expecting to be heard.

III.

Let me tell you of the gentleness my aspirations keep me from. I want to reminisce how my sister called the dryer fighting fighting, but it always ends with the labour of folding. We’re all of us mules for history, loading it on our backs. History, that merchant of itself. That clothing dryer.

IV.

Stay. Marrow me. Marrow what I am, skin too. The bones of my speech hide me from the meat my teeth have stripped.

Whatever is hungry to be eaten, offer a dustpan’s life.

Meanwhile, our daily waste: stipend to a rat. Succulent evergreen deciduous grass: we harvest. To earth, we give the dignity of the stepped-upon. We want to stay. To airsong, we give flinch—

(first published in The Margins)

The Cigarette Is Pretext: Smoke Rises from Within

After Amelia Bane / After Jon Sands / After Nazim Hikmet, Li-Young Lee, and Claudia Rankine

Unless you’re practiced as a lola’s wrinkles,

do not flip the lit side of the yosi in your mouth.

They developed this skill in war and carried it

into supervised work with no breaks to speak of.

My smoking is less like revolution, but it helps on the job.

There’s an extra few minutes of break-time for you, depending

how slammed your co-workers are. Be generous:

ash trays and pavements, what they have to take,

it won’t come back half nice. The kisses taste

exquisite as ash. Nods in the rain, friendships

you find and forget. The trick to becoming

a proper smoker is some small grief

there is no relief from and you know it,

so you might as well light something on fire

on a regular basis, take it in and breathe it out

like it’s part of your everyday being. It’s okay

if the grief is large. It’s more important to find less

violent ways of spitting. The worst

way to spit is like a man who has sized up

another human being and is claiming to measure

their worth when he’s really measuring his own

self-disdain. The worst way to smoke

is like you don’t want to. I’ve felt it so many times

from people like me: we ask for a yosi, claiming

we’ve quit, or—more honest but not less painful—

lamenting we can’t. Don’t get me wrong,

pulling singles when you can’t manage

the pack is fully acceptable, I’m only warning

against wistfulness. The smoke knows,

holds on for fear of being abandoned

tight as you wish you were free. I would say I’m sorry

but I already told you smoke works like grief.

Don’t need yellow-stained fingers to know this,

you could just burn the oil in the soup pot

by walking away while heating it on maximum

and have to run it outside. Fingers scalding as you inhale

what’s promised. You could just be sad

without the smoke for company. You could

call your lola’s smoke-voice the first island

you’re from. Keep the light, I have another right here.

(first published in Split This Rock)

Kamatayan Was Exactly Correct

After Amina Saïd / After Jennifer Maramba, Jana Lynne Umipig & Verma Soraya Zapanta

My lola’s chewing is marvelously toothless.

Adobo shines her gums,

she cracks the bones for the marrow’s extra salt.

Trace the letters, she never says, the language of salt.

The story she tells with the power out

has a flashlight pointing up its face.

A minute after the fright, and my

breath is still scuffled. This ocean between

my sweat for her, my tears

and her village. I wasn’t there

when her chewing left.

Since, I swipe the plate and lick

my fingers for her jokes.

Time doesn’t end in us, it goes

how it pleases, requires no welcome-mat

mandala pour of salt

as light settles in the glass, the sand—

she boasts

her bundok smile.

Is Lola also salt?

One part who I am, one part where I’m from?

Years after she died, Undas,

she reminds me

the geometry of her movements: when I brush my hair,

I brush the knots—out of hers. The mess

is also true. Here, our backhand one-arm broom.

My line,

from hips to shoulders, fending off

the curve of hers. My wonderment, let it

be what binds me to salt, its calling

the part my broom can’t sweep away.

(first published in Apogee)

Jungle, at Voltage

After Gwendolyn Brooks / After Terrance Hayes / After Tiana Clark, with samples or interpolations of Sally Wen Mao, Outkast ft. Erykah Badu, William Shakespeare, Tim Seibles, & Nas

we growl at rumble | we humble mumble | we hunter and we bones | we

sunder and we jones | we chlorophyll | we catalyst | we

loosen grime divisions in the wealth | we nocturne stealth | we

stretch the echo valley of our voice out to receive | we gather wings | we graves |

we weave | we bask and grieve | we any day could be your last | we

thicket spice ng miracle, kapwa | we slacken breach | we exhort to cavort | we

bracken thorn as thief | we tala rising cyclical | we rack and braille and screech | we

congregation every type tail and speech | we teem | we matte | we glean | we

racket and steam at thunder, at beam | we compost meritocracy, overhand a feather | we

wick or leather | we brandish anguish dark and laughter after | we

tether | we constellation fireflies | we juke | we

flute | we architecture weather | we mangrove swamp | we

tromp vs. we slither, prowl with jowl vs. hop away and scowl | we pyaar se aashiq scar | we

riverbell | we canopy an oceanswell of green | we sediment in pigment | we

get cut down | we hello gorgeous every shape of moon | we

medicine to sky listen | we ceremony pheremones | we

photosynthesis polyamorous water and sunshine | we source | we brood | we

fawn and dream of touch | we prism drip | we time reclaim | we

land’s refrain | we lose our way | we die back to the one | we

kin | we each direction threshold every step | we terra firm | we spectacle to worms | we

metonym | we stumps | we the part of rhythm you don’t hear but you become | we

erode abodes | relentless we hold on | we elegy harana sutra ode anting-anting Anagolay loob | we

famish, to devour you we flex | we goad | we mode | we signify | we

mollify | we pollen’s fate, de-holify, transliminate | we

slime sublime | we rile ya vile ya guile | we fountain chalice mountain | we prance | we

hum | we variegated foliage | we poultice | we multi-thumb | we

the gathered heat that chants entrancing risen dew above the highest reaching branch | we

suddenness that quilts | we fallen log nurse to roots | we fold upon | we

shade | we know how we get high | we anthill spill | we cacophonic harmony | we

pre-religion orgiastic heathen demon rubric to holier than thou | we

resist plow | we verte-braid | we chant: the body is a chant, the body is a chant | we

tongue | we sprung | we chant | we lung

(first published in PRISM international)