Shayla Lawson is (and / or, at times, has been) an amateur acrobat, an architect, a Dutch housewife, & dog mother to one irascible hound. Her work has appeared in print & online at Tin House, GRAMMA, Salon, The Offing, Guernica, Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, & MiPOesias.  She is the author of: A Speed Education in Human Being, PANTONE, & the forthcoming I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean. A 2017 Oregon Literary & MacDowell Colony Fellow, she is also a member of The Affrilachian Poets.



In these poems, the speaker reveals a self at risk. These lines from “American Wedding” echo through each poem: “I stay clear / of getting marked—too terrified / what may take / hold and possess me.” In these poems, the possession might be emotional or psychological, but it’s also artistic, so that part of the self starts to disappear until the speaker becomes aware it’s happening. For instance in “Seigfried,” the speaker states, “the glimmer of God / I once housed often leaves me.” It’s not only the speaker’s self-awareness that matters in these poems, but an awareness of the self in the world. Could you talk more about this?

I think awareness of the self in the world particularly as it relates to risk, is one of the key factors at play in the experience of marginalized individuals, especially black people.

The Black experience in contemporary America is fraught with peril. That social terror translated historically into religious "fear"—a reverence attributed to a higher power—is often meted out under the ever-present risk of violence.

I wanted to approach this topic in the same way I saw it appear, both overtly and discretely, in Frank Ocean's music. The phrase the glimmer of God is a direct quote from a verse in the Frank Ocean song "Seigfried" which frames the "self at risk" in an existential way, presumably due to its color:

Dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought
That could think of the dreamer that thought
That could think of dreaming and getting a glimmer of God
I be dreaming a dream in a thought
That could dream about a thought
That could think about dreaming a dream
Where I can not…

(Where I can not.) Possession is a form of containment, but so is fear. Therein lies the Biblical paradox at the root of these poems—on each end of the spectrum (moral v. Immoral, Right v. Wrong, Good v. Evil) lies a system of control outside the self. So the awareness present in the poems is an attempt to recalibrate, to achieve autonomy—equilibrium.


Could you talk about how these poems reach a state of equilibrium? How does the self get there spiritually?

The poems are not necessarily meant to achieve equilibrium on the page inasmuch in their union with their source material. In this performance of “Seigfried” you can see how the poem and song work in equipoise—the two halves combining to create a whole, or third entity. I think of spirituality as a quest for belonging.  I think the self achieves a sense of balance when it can recognize itself reflected and refracted in those connections, when the self feels inundated within a sense of purpose. Much like a person searching for spiritual fulfillment, these poems are not only being read, they are listening, they are interpreting, they are offering to their referenced texts new meaning.


I love how your performance of “Seigfried” takes on different movements as it progresses! It’s powerfully orchestrated. I admire the different ways you use your voice in your performances, through recitation and singing. How did the shaylalawsonvideoproject get started?

The shaylalawsonvideoproject never really got started the way I intended. I still use the Vimeo channel to upload performances but, bleh! so much of it feels so old to me now. I started it as a way of working on A Speed Education in Human Being—collaborating with other artists to reexamine the content in my first collection (I guess I'm still a little partial to "Five Piece Hustle" and "When Brooklyn Says 'Anaan'"). I guess it's neat to see how my interest in collaboration continues to evolve.


Your poem “Nights” is one of my favorites because of the way it moves between fantasies: “the chance to finally hold / his knuckle in the stark of Days” and “Like we’re always stuck / in the meet cute / for someone else’s musical.” The line I love most in this poem: “Some Days / the only way being a black girl feels / magic is that it isn’t / real.” Fantasy can make us believe we belong, but it’s fleeting. The true connection here is the one between the young girls nicknaming “all the bruhs” on summer nights and, later, watching the fantasy burn together. This connection is a powerful part of the poem, and I’d love to hear you talk more about it.

"Nights" is one of my favorite poems too. In the introduction to Boys Don't Cry, Frank Ocean describes portions of Blonde as reimagined versions of his boyhood. In my version of Blond(e), the section of the book of which "Nights" is a part, there's a lot of interplay between fantasy and reality, masculinity and femininity, past and future.

One of the things that fascinated me about Frank Ocean as a muse is the ways his boyhood is woven into pivotal moments within millennial black culture: Hurricane Katrina, the election of a bi-racial president, post-racial identity, the burgeoning acceptance of queerness and the abject
violence we've seen executed upon young black bodies. Much in the way that the two representative spellings of Ocean's album (Blond & Blonde) explore the merger of masculine and feminine representations, I use the voice of a black female speaker in many of these poems to round out the discussion of childhood (e.g. "boyhood") created in the songs.

I took "Nights" as an opportunity to create a dialogue around black girlhood that is often on the margins of our cultural conversations about race. Although it is widely recognized that Black Lives Matter is a movement led by queer black women, most people associate it with the
murders of cisgendered black men. Artists like June Jordan & Audre Lorde are responsible for bringing the world the term "self care" to address black women's work within the Civil Rights Movement—how often their devotion to the cause and their community kept them from administering proper attention to their own personhood. Now, the term shows up as a hashtag to every Gweneth Paltrowesque social feed... So often, the intricacies of black girl love, black girl vulnerability are given a subordinate place in storytelling—even in writing by black women, even in my own. I wanted to write a poem that addressed black girlhood, what it feels like to have a crush, what it feels like to have that crush you, what it feels like to move through that as a body relegated to the world of "Best Supporting/ Actress," even in her own narrative.

In the same Boys Don't Cry article that references Frank Ocean's devotion to his imagined boyhood, he references a photograph of a young blonde as the inspiration for his album. "I put myself in her seat then I played it all out in my head. ... Then backwards and forward again. There it is—I got free." It was impossible for me to conduct this examination of Frank Ocean's music and memoir through poetry without addressing its representations of black women.

We have the auntie figure represented in the ubiquitous presence of Rosie Watson in the interludes of both channel ORANGE and Blonde, and odes attributed to men of color. But depictions of black girls within the framework of Ocean's romantic lyrics are pretty sparse. In the song "Nights," Frank Ocean lives with a (potentially black female) lover in Houston, recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and an addiction to "white girl" (cocaine). I'm interested in examining all of this through the lens of social critique; even in creative work heralded as groundbreaking for its examination of what blackness could be—the work is arguably light on depictions of what black women are.

In this way, I am reminded of "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" by Sherman Alexie—"In the great American Indian novel...all of the white people will be Indians and the Indians will be ghosts." Black femininity harnesses so much revolutionary power. But so often this capability is divorced from our culture's responsibility to loving black female bodies. I wanted my version of "Nights" to take a look at those things; to love both black boy and girlhood.


That Alexie quote is so powerful, and reminds me of your poem “Dust”: “I quit writing. / I turn to dust.” In this poem the speaker repeats, “I’m nothing special,” which is a way of hiding but also preserving the self—“Know / what you can’t see, you can’t take.” As the poem progresses, this coping mechanism doesn’t hold; the speaker realizes that quitting doesn’t help, it destroys. The poem ends in a place of strength, but what is most interesting is what happens before the self gets to this place: the hiding, and the coping through quitting as a response to the outside world.

The structural elements you talked about in "Dust" are exactly the things that attracted me to the song. It's definitely a Frank Ocean B-side, a lesser-known track from Nostaligia,ULTRA that I don't hear a lot of buzz about, but I think it's rhetorical structure is pretty powerful: "When the ink dries and the pages turn to dust so will we." I like the direct metaphoric link between writing and religion (the verse is a play on Genesis 3:19). Initially, I started working on my version of "Dust" as an erasure poem—I got really interested in the connection between [music] sampling and palimpsest. I really wanted to stick to the integrity of how the phrasing of the original song uses slight variations of the same text in order to advance the story. There was a Fader article recently that posed the question "What type of writer is Frank Ocean?" to a collection of contemporary writers. Although no one referenced "Dust," the article did mention a quote from Roberto Bolano's Antwerp that feels directly linked to the place "Dust" is speaking to: "Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. Odes to the human and the divine."


The way you connect and merge your words with Frank Ocean's is very inspiring. Is there a full-length of these poems forthcoming?

I Think I'm Ready to See Frank Ocean. Saturnalia Books. 15 March 2018.


I’m really looking forward to your new collection, Shayla. Thank you so much for talking with us about your poems!