Hari Alluri
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Mid Step
pause. The rain, of a sudden, up from the canyon, dampens my outfit.
In the city I just left, I wrapped and wore my lūngi in broad daylight on the regular
to show off my scorn for assimilation—inside my flat where it was most rampant.
*
One by one, my Tinkle comics wrinkled
to the basement, among the dead
moths who ran out of curtains.
Outside
this trolley's window now, the shadow of a partial sidewalk tree
butterfly knifes an awning. He never told me how he came
to the city where we met. Pour cement, it's easier, he said, a cast around your people.
On his corner, where a gas bar's corpse fed returning weeds,
I teach, he continued, a broom to sweep by pouring my hands
on a roadkill bird. Ganesh's watchful outline is near, that mover
of obstacles. Octagon above rectangle, mounted both on pole.
An elephant head with tusks and trunk at the back of a four-way stop.
Our faces etch into the cityscape. Elsewhere, a boat on the sea laden with prison walls.
*
If the roadside deity doesn't eat
the coconut you offer, pray
for a beggar to stumble
cutlass in hand
upon the fruit.
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Hari Alluri is a poet, co-founding editor at Locked Horn Press and current editor of Pacific Review, published by SDSU Press. A VONA and Las Dos Brujas fellow with work in anthologies, journals and online, he is the author of the chapbook The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel) and the forthcoming collection The Flayed City (Kaya). Hari immigrated to Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory at age 12 and currently writes in San Diego, Kumeyaay land.