MiLisa Coleman

milisarcoleman@gmail.com

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.47106/2317

 

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I am a Black gender non-conforming poet, writer, and visual storyteller based in Oakland, CA. I earned my Bachelor of Arts in Digital Media from Cleveland State University; minoring in Sociology and Black Studies. Throughout my life, writing has served as a creative outlet along with visual media. My work illustrates overlapping themes in nature, the human condition, and transcendence; working in tandem with my vegan and minimalist lifestyle. I completed the Baldwin House Urban Writing Residency through Twelve Literary Arts. My first publication is in the forthcoming issue of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. In submitting to the Root Work Journal, I am contributing to the genre of ecopoetry by Black authors. Based on the call, I can learn approaches of incorporating theory from editors and featured poets.

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The poem illustrates a call to divorce the self from double consciousness in order to imagine a reality beyond colonial oppression.

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an ecotone

of sea

and Black -- germane to the plot

a myth

ascribed by the colonial

the material reality for this basin of

flesh i lost my trees

adam's hand of dominion marked

purpose i lost my silver moons

existential ranking

beget

Blackness -- a site of non-location

caged in this circus of civilization

caged in this circus of civilization

caged in this circus of civilization

the classified/the imagined/the

non-self could never lay claim to the

human

a fable

siphoned unabridged sentience

to a relegated domain of the other

Black -- liminal and

seismic

slip toppled vitrine of an identity

complex beget

 a spring

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