Nelly Vee Scores IPC Poetry Victory & Service Award Nomination

Featured Submissions by TC Neville Senior (aka Nelly Vee)

She Writes Like I Bleed

© TC Neville Senior (aka Nelly Vee)

I met my daughter again— not in person first, but in poetry.

Fifteen years vanished like breath in frost. She was seven when they took her— my baby girl, now twenty-three, with words that echo wounds I once hid.

In every verse, I saw myself. The rage. The rhythm. The rawness.

No one told me she writes. No one told me she writes like me. As if absence taught her the shape of silence. As if pain passed down through blood and broken courts became art.

She writes like I bleed— unapologetically. And in her lines, I learned who she became without me.

Not a victim. A vessel. Of survival. Of fire. Of truth.

Now we sit—father and daughter— unpacking years in metaphors. She is my favorite poet. Not because she found her voice… but because she found mine, too.

The Caged One Writes Flame

© TC Neville Senior (aka Nelly Vee)

They locked me away— not in bars, but behind betrayal.

Tore me from my children, ripped roots from the soil of family. Said I wouldn’t rise. Said I’d forget.

But the body they tried to bury held a spirit they couldn’t kill.

I became two— the man in chains, and the fire that wrote through walls.

My enemies built a prison thinking pain would silence me, but my soul took the pen and scratched scripture on smoke.

I, the poet, am the part of me that burned only to become light.

Each word— a resurrection. Each line— a step back to my children.

I write from the wounds they never saw heal. From the ashes of courtrooms, cold visits, empty chairs.

They think I’m gone, but I’m coming— with ink and vengeance, with truth and fire.

Not to beg. Not to break. But to rebuild.

The caged one writes flame— and the flame remembers everything.