My friends were fist fights.We broke each otherdown. To withstand what was aheadwe ate and spat prophecies,cyphered with streetlight hymns.An instrumental neighborhood watch.Boys playing “Monitor the cars”—it’s fun to figure outif your block is being circled.A séance built my home, so we protect it.Graffitied names form pentaclesbonded through ritualistic joywoven through, fear. We stood thererolled the dice,said each homies’ name twice,hoping no other noisecircled back around.
Neighborhood Séance
Vincente G. Perez
Feature Date
- June 12, 2024
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“Neighborhood Séance” from OTHER STORIES TO TELL OURSELVES: by Vincente G. Perez.
Published by Newfound in 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Vincente G. Perez.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Vincente Perez is a poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and digital culture. He is a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program and a Poetry and the Senses Fellow (2021) at UC Berkeley. His debut poetry chapbook, Other Stories to Tell Ourselves, is out now (Newfound 2023). Their poems have appeared in Obsidian, Philadelphia Stories, Third Coast, Poet Lore, Honey Literary, & more!
“Other Stories To Tell Ourselves elucidates the politically personal cost of well-oiled oppressive systems facilitated by breaking people. Through these poems we’re invited to stare down centuries-long violences without flinching, ‘laugh with me,’ Vincente says. With a skillful vulnerability the intangible is made into workably mundane material for reflection and for action. In these poems death is not the end and capitalism is not the beginning. This work is at once a refreshingly humorous and deeply serious call to remember, interrogate, listen, and uncover.”
—Darius Simpson
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