I Was Once a Pan Indian, But Not That Kind

B. Hannah

after Natalie Diaz

I fought a war after school,
wrapped strips of yellow paper around the ends of my braids,
swallowed the cold air of the theatre,
waging love and worse
in words written about a brave girl
by a sad man with round glasses.
I drowned in a lagoon at thirteen, the year
of cycles. I ended a drought in a red dress,
bloomed desert flowers in my throat for the sake of a story,
performed an open letter to the postcolonial
justices at the bench of the tech booth.
I played a drunk pirate and an Injun Brave.
They put me in the front
so I couldn’t even hide my gums bleeding down the
front of my costume. I get older on the stage,

thank the gods of broken stage lights
shaped like suns
that they didn’t dress me as a pine tree.
I would have felt better with horns, mottled jasper in my palms,
false vitality.
My mom did my makeup, pinched the blood to my cheeks,
said I looked like the dolls in her shadow box
with my braids and felt buckskin.
Little Hands is what she called me

when I held them up for her.
The rain will come eventually on the drive, after the sixth
stoplight, before the casino with the
neon feather blinking, the great desert flower.
I am turned into a wound in the mirrored walls of the dressing room,
a hardwood floor like a bloodied battlefield.
I watch from behind a papier-mâché oak tree
as a blonde girl sings the sad man’s song.
Years later, I will forget why I wanted this, and I will
smile my ever-blooming wounds
from the plywood monument in the business park
until my teeth remind you why snakes
draw blood.

Chloe Vilevac

Biography: I’m Chloe, a 4th-year Graphic Design major with a minor in Studio Art. I enjoy dabbling in all things creative—from printmaking and illustrating to painting, music, and writing. I’m passionate about colorful, subversive pieces of artwork, particularly portraiture, and I’m endlessly inspired by my late grandmother Lynn’s achievements in painting and printmaking among other disciplines. I’m proud to submit works to Roots in mediums I picked up because of her.

Artist Statement: Three of Pentacles is a set of triplets, inspired by my feelings around family.

B. Hannah

Biography: B. Hannah is a senior creative writing, Indigenous studies, and German student at OSU. As the legend goes, she’s a storyteller who wandered her way into writing poetry and has been unable to find her way home (not that she’s complaining). She loves to incorporate her love of linguistics, her Cherokee culture and heritage, and her connection to her hometown of Las Vegas into her writing. She is the winner of the 2024 Provost Literary Prize in Poetry and has been featured in the past two issues of PRISM. She’s known for reading too many books about witches.

Artist Statement: This poem tells the story my first time auditioning for a musical when I was in middle school. The show was Peter Pan, and of course, not having had many Native American characters to feel represented by growing up, I wanted to audition for Tiger Lily. I didn’t get the part. Looking back, I have a lot of mixed feelings about that experience, that character, and the show as a whole, but my childhood love of that character, despite now leaving a sour taste, is still part of my roots.