POETRY: HARI ALLURI

DEAR PHOSPHORESCENCE,

If water could be a gnawing thing. If, against you,
the knifeglint of a type of ship. If away is where our eyes point
certain bodies go. If policy, if gaze, what blooms. To demand
certain bodies die a little more. To: from where. How to slur them
with a glow other than blood muzzle. If yours, too,
is a language made for prayer. Make what type of bed
to tuck a country in. Heroicize,
in what order: tenderness, of, lack. Allow me the time
​you take to dry yourself in ocean. Gnawing
​at whose insides. As if a home.

"Dear Phosphorescence," first appears on 18MillionRising.org as part of the #NoMuslimBanEver Micropoem Series.

Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya) and Carving Ashes (CiCAC/Thompson Rivers). A winner of the 2020 Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Poetry Fellowship for Poets of Color and an editor at Locked Horn Press, he has received grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and fellowships from Las Dos Brujas, Port Townsend, and VONA/Voices writers workshops. His work appears in the Pandemic Solidarity (Pluto) and Poetry In Voice / Les voix de la poésie anthologies, as well as recently in Anomaly, The Capilano Review, Ovenbird, Prism International, The Puritan, and elsewhere.