Self-Reflexive Portrait in Stereotype No 8: 
Black as What Surrounds a Sickle Moon

Here comes my tautology—
A blackness of a blackness of a blackness…
-Amaud Jamaul Johnson, “Pigmeat”

 

I.
you go on in the dark
wreath of midnight mornings
as dust nursed by twilight

I.
you mirror the cocked open neck
of a lost thing found in a plantation
forest, you and your shot-out eyes

I.
you and your swart eclipse
water stung by night rain
the pinpricked flag bent over it all

I.
a blank body born from a blank gut
the shadow moth starved of day
its tongue hinged on its own wing


by Jonah Mixon-Webster 

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Jonah Mixon-Webster is a text/sound poet, and teaching artist from Flint, MI. He is a current Ph.D. candidate in English Studies with an emphasis in Poetry & Paracolonial Poetics at Illinois State University where he also serves as the editorial assistant for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. A Callaloo Fellow, his poetry and sound art is featured or forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Oaken Transformations: Poetry & Sculpture Walk, Los Angeles Review of Books’ Radio Poemerica, and Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.