Torture Tactics
After the AGM-114R9X Hellfire missile
Hey babe look. New bomb
dropped. Except it’s not new
and very advanced and not
a punch line. This poetry not
supposed to exist. They tried
to kill me is the first fact of
Blackness. Shot straight and
true.
Stick to the script provided by
The mayflower sticking its landing.
Pilgrimage, a native feast that cycles
like the seasons but never pauses.
Check out the destination of home
grown warfare. Philadelphia bombings,
abortion clinic fires, synagogue bullets,
freedom.
My life is taxed and the funds
go towards death. Wake up in the
wake. Déjà vu, a mirror trick. There
is no new occurrence, no original, no
discrepancy, just war. US exported,
lucrative lux, a shining with massacre
in tow. Grief implies meaning in the
suffer.
Whiteness is a dare. How much
can be done to further an idea?
What are the limits of social
structure? Can the plantation be
a global psychic event or only
a modern one? Still the sirens,
the dogs, the hunt. Mental chain
gang.
Vincente G. Perez
Vincente G. Perez, PhD is a decolonial poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop studies, and digital culture. Within his poetry, he treats consciousness as a material that poetry can mold otherwise. He holds a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley and was a Poetry and the Senses Fellow at the Arts Research Center. His debut chapbook, Other Stories to Tell Ourselves (Newfound 2023), won an Eric Hoffer finalist award. His poems have appeared in Obsidian, Poet Lore, Philadelphia Stories, Huizache, Third Coast, and more. For more writing visit www.vincenteperez.com
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
Perez is managing tones (anger, humor, heart) so well in this poem. The opening line creates a kind of cognitive dissonance which resonates with the kind most of us feel on a daily basis living in a post-colonial capitalist hellscape. The poem is working within the kind of pop-culture language of today while laying out the faults of military violence. A lot of the work I’ve been selecting lately falls within this pop-culture political critique and I love the canon of art (pun unintended but then realized and I left it) I am building.
Within the context of the form (the missile created by the four offset words) I just felt incredibly compelled. And for a poem to be "after" a missile makes a crucial point about how art is affected by the political violence of the era it was written in. It really set me up for success in the reading of the rest of the poem. The line “This poetry not supposed to exist,” set within the first stanza followed by the erasure of black men through police violence, followed by the violent jump to “true,” setting up the refrain and the contrapunctal nature of the poem, are all incredibly deft moves.
This is a nuanced, textured, and well executed poem. Love. Love. Love.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
I chose BRAWL and Team Taylor because this poem was rejected by a different magazine, but within the rejection email, Taylor suggested I consider placing the poem with BRAWL. Once I read the guidelines and saw work like Ra Ebrahim's "Cranach the Elder Gets Me To Chill Out" I knew this poem would be given a conscious and thorough review before a snap judgement was made. This mag sees the value in punchy poems with teeth and the craft within work considered too controversial for public view. (there's a scary and disheartening wave of anti-intellectualism and censorship that I wanted to circumvent)
As you navigate the form of this poem (and your other work) how are you thinking about the offset language? Did those four words (true. freedom. suffer. gang.) come about first, or through the writing process?
The offset language is my experimentation with the contrapuntal form. I wanted to move the reader into a staggered, shifting experience where the eyes/head/focus is wrenched from its normative place, left aligned with linear logic, and instead escapes into the rest of the white page and feeling of absence. The four words were at first end lines on their own lines, but I decided to create even more distance with center alignment.
Can you talk to me about how you wrote the poem "after" a missile? It's such a powerful statement and I'd love to hear more about writing "after" an object of violence, rather than another artist/poet?
I believe that material societal change comes from experimentation at the intersection of theory and practice. It's been horrifying to watch so many writers and poets stay silent in the midst of genocide, war, and conflict. I decided to cut through the bullshit and demand my reader start at a place where some refuse to ever go. Formally, this meant beginning with a strong title and the move to make the poem "after" an object of violence, a missile currently being used to kill, maim, and torture Palestinans, placing the spotlight on the absence and loss that is reproduced when we can't even name the violence let alone demand it end.
On your website you write: "My work adds to the chorus of voices, experiences, and life that affirm Black life, queer futurity, indigenous sovereignty, intersectional feminism, and various other ways of living, being, and knowing." My question here is twofold: as you engage with a poetic chorus, what other poets do you see engaging with you in this chorus that you would you point BRAWL reader toward to continue engaging in a poetic dialogue that refuses to "stay silent in the midst of genocide, war, and conflict,"? and also, as your own work affirms these values, how are you thinking about how you engage with the publishing community as a whole?
I love this question because I think the only way to become a great poet is to study craft and that means the work of your contemporaries and the people that trained them or that they studied. I would point people to the poets Safia Elhillo, Darius Simpson, Mosab Abu Toha, Noname, Aja Monet, and Danez Smith. I am in the publishing community in order to disrupt and reconfigure rather than to simply contribute and be grateful for having a seat at the table. I am a cultural worker so my poetry moves the reader to consider consciousness as something that must be moulded like clay into something that either supports the status quo or disrupts it. I'm here to link poetry with political education and encourage a practice of deep reading and listening--something that is being taken from us because critical thinking remains a threat to the powers that be.