Freedom
He published his first book at nineteen and named it Freedom because he did not have it yet. Naming a thing you do not have is one way of beginning to want it correctly. He has found this to be true across multiple categories of his life. You name the…
The First Reading
He does his first reading at twenty. The bookstore is in Northampton — small, independent, the kind of store where the owner knows every book and has an opinion about all of them. He has been in touch with her for three months, since he found her email…
Three Names
He is Poetic Vincent on Facebook. He is Vincent Poe on the books. He is ProphetPoe on the site that is going to change things, if he can keep building it. He chose these names the way he has chosen everything in his creative life — not randomly, not by…
The Body
The trigger on Thursday is a song. He is in the grocery store on Boston Road — not his usual one, the one with the self-checkout lanes he prefers because they require less interaction with other humans, but the one closer to the apartment that he uses…
The Reading
He reads at a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon in October — not his coffee shop, someone else’s, a place in the South End that he has driven past a dozen times and not been in. He parks and walks to the door and goes inside the way he goes into…
What He Carries
August 16, 2023. Wednesday. He writes the date in the notebook the way he always writes the date — top of the page, matter-of-factly, without ceremony. He has done this for eleven years. The dates form a kind of spine through the archive, a skeleton of…
Holyoke
The city that made him is twenty minutes north on I-91 and a different world. He drives there sometimes — not often, not regularly, but sometimes, when he needs to remember the shape of where he came from. He does not go inside anything. He drives the…
The Notebook
The first thing Vincent does every morning is check that the notebook is still there. It sits on the left side of his desk, black cover worn soft at the corners, pages swollen with ink and humidity from the Springfield summer. He does not open it right…
The Story Is Still Being Written
I have published seven poetry collections. I have been featured on Spectrum News 1. I have given books away to people who could not afford them, because I always believed that words should reach whoever needs them — not just whoever can pay. I built .…
The Man Today
Today, I live in Western Massachusetts. My life is quieter than it used to be. But quieter does not always mean easier. Trauma has a way of staying with you. PTSD does not leave just because the circumstances change. Old memories can make simple moments…