Shayla Lawson

Shayla Lawson considers it a privilege to be counted amongst the Affrilachian Poets because, of late, she finds herself working more as a collector than a writer. She graduated from UK’s School of Architecture in the spring. She has worked as a writing teacher for Lexington’s Carnegie Center and a recurring critic on the local television show bookclub@KET. Her writing appears in Wind and Limestone literary magazines and a collective exhibit in San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, the first major museum in the world focused on African issues.

Outhouse

My friend visits her family in India
and returns with stories
of squatting over a flushable hole in a room.

That’s how
(when)
she knew where she was.

Together, in the diesel bullet I drive
through this pass of night,
she does not say this
I read it in the air
in the muffled letters spattered on
the coarse locks she keeps
brushing out her face
coming out
too fast too slow at the same time.
I want to say I can not hear her.

At this time in my life
things keep coming out.
Memory plays so loud over and over
there is not enough breath in the car
for squatting in India
and the air shredding windows;

my thoughts corrode
I can not stand
the weight of bones
on my skin anymore.
I want to talk so slow so fast
I am on singular stretch of
rubber running streets.

Every time I say things this way
it feels like shattering bathroom glass
in the scatter of a wet clean face:
the hot-cold eyes,
the gasp,
the drowning.
I wake and end each day like this

in a was of solvent film
I can’t get clean.
What is left stains like bleach.
My face comes out.

I try to pencil in my eyes where I left it.
I take a pen and trace out circles with my left hand.
I should tell her where I am,
“I am not driving anymore
I am moving.”
I can not hear her.
I pretend I am calm
—there is an outhouse
on the edge of this road.

I want.

I try to disguise it
but it comes out like a vein
like a drug that goes
hit
hit
hit
all the time.