SeMutOnge
“SeMutOnge” is a sound poetry piece that came out of my Works on Water/Underwater New York residency project, MuTonges. This piece was an experimentation with anagrams where I took each line of a previously written poem inspired by the enslaved Africans who were thrown overboard at sea during the Atlantic Slave Trade and rearranged the letters in each of the words to create a new language. I used various methods including writing the line backward and counting every few letters, cycling around until all the letters in the line letter were used. I did the anagrams three times with each line to represent the trinity of past, present, and future as one. The use of anagrams was to represent the fluidity of language and meaning over space and time, the power of water to erode and mutate physical entities, as well as the disruptive force of the slave trade. Through that breakage and change, a new creation is birthed into the world much like the anagrammatic language that allows for new possibilities of presence and meaning. The resulting sound piece is to inspire an oceanic feeling as if the listener is in a womb and the words are surrounding them.
Wave Theory ([K]not Seeing God Through the Shadows)
channel
first contact
underwater colliding
swallow bodies seeds
an ocean floor
genre fluid Moses
of the Atlantic
a ghostly haze whispered
into water
carry me across
the black water
wave cleared
a the
rising wall
the wild water
the virtual Aquapolis
crossing the sands
the collective solution
from a
formed sonic
creation wave
light signaling
through the mist
ori below
Body of Water
About the Artist
Sherese Francis is a southeast Queens-based poet, text artist, workshop facilitator, and literary curator of the mobile library project, J. Expressions. She has published work in journals and anthologies including Obsidian Lit, Furious Flower, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, La Pluma Y La Tinta's New Voices Anthology, The Pierian Literary Review, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, she has published two chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls and Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling.