EMERGING ARTISTS & WRITERS
IRENE VAZQUEZ
ARS POETICA
Poet as cannonball. Poet as betrayal, betrayed. Poet as love, verb and noun. Poet as unbridled.
Poet as 3 slashed tires. Poet as 5 angry voicemails. Poet as desperation. Poet as I-love-you-but.
Poet as entropy. Poet as sledgehammer. Poet as target and weapon. Poet as overflowing toilet.
Poet as question and answer. Poet as echoed tears in an empty house.
Poet as giver. Poet as dichotomy. Poet as perennial mess. Poet as burned-at-own-stake. Poet as
canvas and brush. Poet as borderland.
Poet as slurred speech. Poet as fear embodied. Poet as tying-up-loose-ends. Poet as fire. Poet as
fire. Poet as fire.
Poet as binge. Poet as paper cut. Poet as playing God. Poet as recurring nightmare. Poet as
churning stomach. Poet as rancid love. Poet as apocalypse.
Poet as sepia tone. Poet as epiphany. Poet as we’re-all-mad-here. Poet as effort. Poet as
crossed-out lines. Poet as proliferation. Poet as breaking out full speed.
Poet as animal, vegetable, mineral. Poet as person, place, thing. Poet as anthropologist,
archaeologist. Poet as resurrection.
Poet as karma. Poet as new world. Poet as complement, not compliment. Poet as quilter. Poet as
vigilante. Poet as lifeboat. Poet as beginning, middle, end. Poet as truth. Poet as truth.
Irene Vazquez is a junior in high school residing in Houston, Texas. She received a regional Silver Key for her poetry in the Scholastic Writing Awards and an honorable mention in the 2014 Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, sponsored by Hollins University. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Rollick, Rising Phoenix Review, and Words Dance Mag, among others.