At four feet square, Nukha̱klo okokko confronts the viewer with grief made visible. A woman closes her eyes as dark strands of hair sweep outward around her, their restless movement contained within a broken circle of copper. Genuine copper gilding catches the light against deep black, turquoise, and earthen tones, creating a tension between darkness and illumination, stillness and upheaval.

In Choctaw culture, cutting one’s hair during mourning is an outward expression of profound loss—a living tradition that continues within many Choctaw families today. Phillips draws upon this cultural practice without reducing it to illustration. The severed hair becomes both a personal wound and an expression of shared cultural memory: love, identity, and a lifetime of unspoken promises suddenly cut from the body.

The painting is accompanied by Phillips’s poem Okokko, in which private anguish unfolds while the ordinary world continues outside. Morning crosses the mountains. A jay calls. Squirrels race down an old oak. Inside, grief is violent enough to tilt the room.

Okokko

Today

Morning still found

Its way over the mountains.

Warm light crept

Through darkness,

Edging away the night.

Slanted dawn falls

Across aged floorboards,

Casting shadows in the corners.

A lifetime of unspoken promises

Now at my feet

In severed tresses.

A scream shatters the quiet.

Nails pierce my spine—

A horrid, gut-wrenching sound.

The room tilts.

I whirl, frantic,

Searching for the source.

Did that shriek rip itself from my chest?

Hellhounds howl from my depths.

Suddenly I am too weak to stand.

Outside,

A jay mocks the sunrise while

Two squirrels race down the old oak.

And yet,

Morning still found

Its way over the mountains.

Connie D. Phillips

Nukha̱klo okokko is not about overcoming grief. It is about enduring the severance—carrying love, memory, and cultural tradition forward even after loss has changed the shape of everything.