Spiral
Hari Alluri
What seeps in me from weeks of rain
making me forget
the life-give part in water.
The world this morning
reminds me too much
of my insides that night I almost
abandoned the balcony.
Three pages deep of furious
language. Scratching
worry into my journal
before I can say, please,
let me
stop. Notice,
on the outside table
this jagged bouquet:
tobacco seeds, dried,
still attached to the cut
few inches of their last-year stalks,
wrinkled fire
in a mini vase. It doesn’t look much
like promise, but it is.
Copyright © 2024 by Hari Alluri. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 1, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
word pond 
I want to put down what the mountain has awakened.
My mouthful of grass.
My curious tale. I want to stand still but find myself moved patch by patch.
There’s a bleat in my throat. Words fail me here. Can you understand? I sink to
my knees tired or not. I now know the ragweed from the goldenrod, and the blinding
beauty of green. Don’t you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a wolf spider,
the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe. I have fallen from my dream
of progress: the clear-cut glass, the potted and balconied tree, the lemon-waxed
wood over a marbled pillar, into my own nocturne. The lullabies I had forgotten.
How could I know what slept inside? What would rend my fantasies to cud and up
from this belly’s wet straw-strewn field—
these soundings.
Vievee Francis, “Another Antipastoral”