
Root Work Journal - Navigating the Ocean - Volume 1, Issue 2
Insurgent Being After Langston Hughes
MiLisa Coleman
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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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