VINCENT PRUIS
Portrait by @hvmbl3d
About Vince
Vincent Pruis is an outdoorsy poet-person based in Ellensburg, Washington.
Zir writing has been featured in ArtWay, Image, The Ocotillo Review, OUT/CAST, and Gigantic Sequins, among other publications. Vince's first manuscript, In Transit, was also a finalist for the 2019 Kallisto Gaia Press Contemporary Poetry Chapbook Prize and is now available for purchase!
Previously, Vince worked as the social media coordinator for Image journal and, after serving as the assistant project coordinator for KTF - the Prison Project (an arts therapy program for incarcerated women), ze designed and edited KTF's 2018 Anthology.
In 2019, Vince graduated from Seattle Pacific University with a degree in creative writing and started zir master's degree in anthropology research at Northern Arizona University.
While in Flagstaff, Arizona, ze worked as a research assistant for Feral Atlas, a digital humanities project on environmental anthropology, focusing specifically on the intersection of human structures and the environment. Now Vince works for the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust in zir favorite forest beneath zir true love, Mount Stuart.
Selected Poems
"Grief"
"Lightning"
"On the Dock Beside Him" & "Ghazal: Honeyed Lips"
"Dawn on the Lake Washington Shipping Canal" (Jun 30)
&
"Hiking Deception Pass" (July 7)
Driving While You Sleep
Rain swells over the windshield wipers, each tidal wave part
of a bead curtain that streaks the glass and blurs the night,
and I trace every rivulet to its end, floating up with each away
from the murky headlights and our loosely linked hands that rest,
limp, on your thigh. I drift free from my knot of veins, woven
like kelp, to the surface where I touch the empty sky for the first time
since we met (when your grey eyes submerged me like a prophecy,
an end-time flood that sweeps mountains and mingles orcas
with the evergreens we’re passing by). Now the rain’s dark patter
echoes through space, overwhelming your sighs, those siren exhalations
that would anchor me beside you. So my care floats, unmoored,
on the surface of Love as I draw my hand from yours to adjust
the windshield wipers, so I can see the road.
Previously published in The Lingua Journal
Porous
Because the apricot pit pore scrub teaches me / that it is cleansing to tear the skin I do not like / and because Christ mocked the men unwilling to change and said / so cut off the hand that causes you to sin / when I do not like what my eyes see / I clutch the dessert spoon / that I should have thrown out with the Oreo ice cream and cottage cheese and celery / and I scoop / and the delivery is delicious / and I am delivered / and pain is a redemption that tastes like apricots / the because becoming a sweet pelt of vacancy / purity an emptiness ensured / by removal of the wrinkled brown core / a hollow leaking syrup / syrup prophesying the end / of imperfection / the end of seeing myself imperfect / the end of seeing / myself.
Previously published in The Lingua Journal