Hari Alluri, Tabako on the Windowsill

  

Windowsill Offering for Eric

In the crematorium’s service room, taking clumsy, ginger turns around the cardboard holding your body, such a thin distance, 4 generations of multi-iteration family scrawl and draw our messages for you to take. An act of reaching. Even here, the squeal and fight of children over markers carries what’s most sombre.

This act of releasing you to mark how we must begin to hold you another way, a promise in touch, which no one can live up to constant: from outside the chapel’s doors, through the service room, around and down the hall—Sade’s “By Your Side” playing off your celebrant’s phone as we arrange ourselves—one hand reaching forward to the next shoulder, in to the shoulders of your closest and your closest blood, finally onto Niki’s.

Hers, the most difficult task. Even as it’s her finger on the switch: when she presses it to give your body to fire—held and utterly alone—none of us are free of it. Our hope, which is also our fear: that we reach across to the other side with you, that the messages we wrote carry us with them in the flame.

The latest poetry title by British Columbia-based “a migrant poet of Filipinx and South Asian descent” Hari Alluri is the collection Tabako on the Windowsill (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), a book I’m just getting to now. Subtitled “(poems to burn),” Alluri’s first-person narratives offer quiet gestures composed as direct response, akin to elegy or prayer, both for and to the living, and the dead. “May you outgrow many pairs of shorts, Anak. / And if a dryer doesn’t get them first,” begins the poem “Mountain Walk Offering for My Godson,” “your socks might inch down past your heels / bothering your arch and toes. That pattern will turn / to wearing thin, to changing style.” There’s a calming, soothing effect in Alluri’s lyrics—a gentle and attentive intimacy—even as losses compound across these meditations, so, too, the celebration of life and family, heart and the present moment. These are poems of witness, of gesture, attempting to articulate, appreciate and hold (“capture” doesn’t seem the right word, here) a moment, before it might fade. “Here, on the morning ride to work,” Alluri writes, as part of “A Pavement Sweeper’s Quarry,” “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.”

The strength of these poems are found precisely through the understated way they’re written, attending and appreciating what so often isn’t noticed, caught or spoken. “I will always thank the day I turned towards these mountains here and saw / not the country I feared wants me dead or gone or totally subsumed,” he writes, as part of “Hum Its Dizziness Like Sugar in Tea,” “but / mountains, volcanic. Cousins / to those who made the islands my nanay is from, and beautiful even if they weren’t. // The deities I brought with me and seek, may they never become a pipeline dug into this land.” It might seem out of fashion to compose poems so overtly thankful, both for those the narrator has known and where he now lives, but Alluri manages a grace through the hush, across the foundations of human connection. As well, moving through prose poems, couplets and more traditional lyric stanza-blocks, the twists and turns of Alluri’s sentences and phrases are subtle, offering twists that hide in plain sight, shifting an effect of what one reads against what one might expect to read. The effect, to be sure, is quite striking. This is a book that will absolutely surprise.