POETRY

Episode 8: Brazen Jackson: "Tomahawk Chop!"

By Celia Bland     VOLUME 56 No. 1

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Osceola, lachrymose, grows lean as he assays Kissimmee.
His calloused feet weep with fecund Florida glades,
black to the ankles and always aching.

Brazen Jackson wears custom Air Force 1's
with a swoosh azure as kingfisher.
He never sets foot in Everglades, though Cousin Gator
waits hungrily to greet him and roseate spoonbills, Lilly Pulitzer
pink, stand on one leg to glimpse his arrival.

Jackson scalps tickets to Gator Bowl—selling trinkets
to Covid gang and T-shirts to indigenous—

Shop!—

as the Seminoles lose 12-2.

Chop!

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CELIA BLAND’s third collection of poetry, Cherokee Road Kill, was featured in an essay by Jonathan Blunk in The Georgia Review. She is co-editor with Martha Collins of Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (University of Michigan, 2019) and the author of YA biographies of the Native American leaders Pontiac, Osceola, and Peter MacDonald, and of The Conspiracy of the Secret Nine, a young adult novel about the Wilmington, NC race riots of 1898. Madonna Comix, an image and poetry collaboration with artist Dianne Kornberg, was exhibited at NYC’s Lesley Heller Gallery and published with an introduction by Lucy Sante. Her work has been included in anthologies published by Faber & Faber, Station Hill Press, University of Michigan, Finishing Line Press, Persea Books, CavanKerry, and Tupelo Press.


VOLUME 56 No. 1