Spiral

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. 

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“‘Spiral’ is a rare poem for me, written directly after—almost still within—the moment. It asks me to contend with multiple layers of embodied experience and memory at once, the human-made tragedies entangled with my own tendencies. It’s a poem of reminder. I am often troubled by the ways this poem is troubled. When I attempted to expand ‘Spiral,’ it asked me to resist mediation and instead move closer to a small moment whose attention, whose formal smallness, might hold with it a return to living in and responding to the world beyond.”
—Hari Alluri