People
The world gets to him the way it gets to everyone who feels things without a volume knob. Slowly at first. Then all at once. He is thinking about this on a Sunday in late July — July 23rd, he writes it in the notebook, top of the page, the date that…
Before the Break
There is a version of him that exists before everything gets harder. He can see it clearly now — the way you can only see the full shape of weather from inside the house, once the storm has passed and the sky is doing something new. He was twenty,…
The Archive
He opens the closet and takes out the box. He does this rarely — not because the box is scared exactly, because it is not sacred exactly, but because opening it costs something. He has forty-three notebooks in that box and each one represents a period of…
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…