Crop
Issue 19
Alex Vidal Pérez
2026
After the Parsley Massacre of 1937
You have machete hands for agriculture.
Plant something. Link bodies and let the river
wash them because water talks too damn much.
Use machete hands to cut cotton, heads, cut
limbs, and tongues with a mouthful of parsley.
Ask the bodies to stand in a straight line
machete ready as a ruler for execution.
Kicking up unholy dust.
Southern hospitality creates bobbing bodies,
limbless, tongueless. Call it cleansing,
call it “fixing” our people, call it
blanqueamiento.
Big general calls for the execution of
our siblings across the border. Calls them
animals, unclean—blames them for the
darkening of our skins as he strips them
away from theirs.
Swallowing parsley means accepting
death. It means condemnation for
the damned.
Alex Vidal Pérez is a senior slam poet who occasionally likes to dive in creative nonfiction. His work has been published on Rivercraft, Sanctuary and elsewhere. Moved by the world around him, their work centers around activism, playing with language, and keeping memory alive. On campus, he serves as the Vice President for SU Slam Poetry Club, the Secretary for the Black Student Union, a Build Collaborative Fellow, among other things. They enjoy writing about world issues, the mundane, reading about magical realism and anything by Gabriel García Márquez.